The HERA-B ring imaging Cherenkov counter

The HERA-B RICH uses a radiation path length of 2.8 m in C4F10 gas and a large 24 m2 spherical mirror for imaging Cherenkov rings. The photon detector consists of 2240 Hamamatsu multi-anode photomultipliers with about 27 000 channels. A 2:1 reducing two-lens telescope in front of each photomultiplier tube increases the sensitive area at the expense of increased pixel size, resulting in a contribution to the resolution which roughly matches that of dispersion. The counter was completed in January of 1999, and its performance has been steady and reliable over the years it has been in operation. The design performance of the Ring Imaging Cherenkov counter was fully reached: the average number of detected photons in the RICH for a β=1 particle was found to be 33 with a single-hit resolution of 0.7 and 1 mrad in the fine and coarse granularity regions, respectively.