Status of the high-performance DIRC detector for the Future Electron Ion Collider experiment

Abstract

The next frontier project of nuclear physics in the United States will be the Electron-Ion Collider (EIC), planned to be built in the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL). Excellent particle identification (PID) is an essential requirement for the EIC central detector. Identification of the hadrons in the final state is critical to study how different quark flavors contribute to nucleon properties. A detector based on the Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) principle, with a radial size of only a few cm, is a perfect solution for those requirements. The R&D program performed by the EIC PID collaboration (eRD14) is focused on designing a high-performance DIRC (hpDIRC) that would extend the momentum coverage well beyond the state-of-the-art 3 standard deviations or more separation of π/K up to 6 GeV/c, e/π up to 1.8 GeV/c, and p/K up to 10 GeV/c. Key components are a special 3-layer compound lens and small pixel-size photo-sensors. This article describes the status of the high-performance DIRC R&D for the EIC detector, with a focus on efforts towards developing and validating the radiation hard 3-layer lens.