The CBM RICH project

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment will study the properties of super dense nuclear matter by means of heavy ion collisions at the future FAIR facility. An integral detector component is a large Ring Imaging Cherenkov detector with CO2 gas radiator, which will mainly serve for electron identification and pion suppression necessary to access rare dileptonic probes like e+e− decays of light vector mesons or J/Ψ. We describe the design of this future RICH detector and focus on results obtained by building a CBM RICH detector prototype tested at CERN-PS.