The experience of building and operating COMPASS RICH-1

COMPASS RICH-1 is a large size gaseous Imaging Cherenkov Detector providing hadron identification in the range from 3 to 55 GeV/c, in the wide acceptance spectrometer of the COMPASS Experiment at CERN SPS.It uses a 3 m long C4F10 radiator, a 21 m2 large VUV mirror surface and two kinds of photon detectors: MAPMTs and MWPCs with CsI photocathodes, covering a total of 5.5 m2. It is in operation since 2002 and its performance has increased in time thanks to progressive optimization and mostly to a major upgrade which was implemented in 2006.The main characteristics of COMPASS RICH-1 components are described and some specific aspects related to the radiator gas system, the mirror alignment, the MWPC electrical stability and the readout electronics are discussed.Some key features of the event reconstruction and the PID analysis are presented together with results from the COMPASS RICH-1 performance characterization study.