First results from the HERMES recoil detector

The HERMES collaboration at HERA has constructed and commissioned a new detector system which greatly expands the experiment´s tracking and particle identification capabilities for particles scattered at large angles. The detector is specifically designed to detect the recoil protons from exclusive processes and reject background from competing channels. The recoil detector system consists of a double layer silicon microstrip detector used as a DeltaE-E telescope, a scintillating fiber tracker (SFT) based magnetic spectrometer, and a 3 layer tungsten scintillator sampling calorimeter. The detector was installed in the HERMES experiment in Winter 2005/2006 and saw first beam in February. The commissioning of the SFT was finished in February but due to beam induced noise the silicon detector commissioning could only be finished in September. From September 2006 to the end of HERA operation on June 30^th HERMES collected 3/4 fb^-1 of data. In this document our first results on the detector performance will be presented.