Performance Study of a Prototype Modular RICH Detector for EIC Experiments

A PID consortium (called eRD$14$) has been formed to explore the frontier of particle identification technologies for the future Electron Ion Collider (EIC) experiments. A modular RICH detector prototype has been designed and constructed for identifying pions and kaons in the momentum range of $3$ to $10$ GeV/c. The main components of this detector that include a block of aerogel, a Fresnel lens, a four-sided mirror set, and a photosensor plane, are fitted in a $10\text{cm}\times10\text{cm}\times10\text{cm}$ volume. The prototype was tested at Fermilab in April of $2016$. The preliminary results from this beam test and the comparison with Geant$4$ simulation results will be presented in this talk.