A 56 mm twin aperture model dipole magnet for the large hadron collider has been built at CERN. The magnet design incorporates stainless steel collars and a special yoke structure to minimize saturation-induced field errors. The magnet has proved to be the most successful model prototype constructed so far. In the tests the design field of 10.0 Tesla was achieved with a record-short training. In this paper, the quench performance and the electromagnetic behavior of the magnet are presented and discussed. TABLE I MFISC MAIN PARAMETERS