In-beam evaluation of a medium-size Resistive-Plate WELL gaseous particle detector

In-beam evaluation of a fully-equipped medium-size 30$\times$30 cm${}^2$ Resistive Plate WELL (RPWELL) detector is presented. It consists here of a single element gas-avalanche multiplier with Semitron ESD225 resistive plate, 1 cm${}^2$ readout pads and APV25/SRS electronics. Similarly to previous results with small detector prototypes, stable operation at high detection efficiency (>98%) and low average pad multiplicity (~1.2) were recorded with 150 GeV muon and high-rate pion beams, in Ne/(5%CH${}_4$), Ar/(5%CH${}_4$) and Ar/(7%CO${}_2$). This is an important step towards the realization of robust detectors suitable for applications requiring large-area coverage; among them Digital Hadron Calorimetry.