Status of ARGO-YBJ: an overview

Within a Collaboration Agreement between INFN and CAS (Chinese Academy of Science), the ARGO-YBJ experiment is completely installed at the YangBaJing Cosmic Ray Laboratory (4300 m a.s.l., Tibet, P.R. China). ARGO-YBJ is a plane detector, with a total detection area of ∼6500 m2, made of Resistive Plate Chambers (RPCs) which provide a detailed space-time picture of the charged component of the extensive air showers. At present the detector is completely mounted and the central carpet of 5800 m2 is operating under a multiplicity trigger Npad⩾20, the trigger rate is about 3.5kHz and the data flow is 5MB/s. A 0.5 cm lead converter will be mounted on the detector in summer 2007.