Conception and design of a control and monitoring system for the mirror alignment of the CBM RICH detector

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future Facility for Anti-proton and Ion Research (FAIR) complex will investigate the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter at high baryon density and moderate temperatures created in A+A collisions. For the SIS100 accelerator, the foreseen beam energy will range up to 11 AGeV for the heaviest nuclei. One of the key detector components required for the CBM physics program is the Ring Imaging CHerenkov (RICH) detector, which is developed for efficient and clean electron identification and pion suppression. An important aspect to guarantee a stable operation of the RICH detector is the alignment of the mirrors. A qualitative alignment control procedure for the mirror system has been implemented in the CBM RICH prototype detector and tested under real conditions at the CERN PS/T9 beamline. Collected data and results of image processing are reviewed and discussed. In parallel a quantitative method using recorded data has also been employed to compute mirror displacements of the RICH mirrors. Results based on simulated events and the limits of the method are presented and discussed as well. If mirror misalignment is detected, it can be subsequently included and rectified by correction routines. A first correction routine is presented and a comparison between misaligned, corrected and ideal geometries is shown.