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A slow control system (SCS) for the Aerogel Ring Imaging Cherenkov (ARICH) counter in the Belle II experiment was newly developed and coded in the development frameworks of the Belle II DAQ software. The ARICH is based on 420 Hybrid Avalanche Photo-Detectors (HAPDs). Each HAPD has 144 pixels to be readout and requires 6 power supply (PS) channels, therefore a total number of 2520 PS channels and 60,480 pixels have to be configured and controlled. Graphical User Interfaces (GUIs) with detector oriented view and device oriented view, were also implemented to ease the detector operation. The ARICH SCS is in operation for detector construction and cosmic rays tests. The paper describes the detailed features of the SCS and preliminary results of operation of a reduced set of hardware which confirm the scalability to the full detector.

For the Belle II spectrometer a proximity focusing RICH counter with an aerogel radiator (ARICH) will be employed as a PID system in the forward end-cap region of the spectrometer. The detector will provide about 4 σ separation of pions and kaons up to momenta of 3.5 GeV/ c , at the kinematic limits of the experiment. We present the up-to-date status of the ARICH simulation and reconstruction software, focusing on the recent improvements of the reconstruction algorithms and detector description in the Geant4 simulation. In addition, as a demonstration of detector readout software functionality we show the first cosmic ray Cherenkov rings observed in the ARICH.

In the forward end-cap of the Belle II spectrometer, a proximity focusing Ring Imaging Cherenkov counter with an aerogel radiator will be installed. The detector will occupy a limited space inside solenoid magnet with longitudinal field of 1.5 T. It will consist of a double layer aerogel radiator, an expansion volume and a photon detector. 420 Hamamatsu hybrid avalanche photo sensors with 144 channels each will be used to read out single Cherenkov photons with high efficiency. More than 60,000 analog signals will be digitized and processed in the front end electronics and send to the unified experiment data acquisition system. The detector components have been successfully produced and are now being installed in the spectrometer. Tested before on the bench, they are currently being installed in the mechanical frame. Part of the detector have been commissioned and connected to the acquisition system to register the cosmic ray particles. The first preliminary results are in accordance with previous expectations. We expect an excellent performance of the device which will allow at least a 4 σ separation of pions from kaons in the experiment kinematic region from 0.5 GeV/c to 4 GeV/c.

The proximity-focusing Aerogel Ring-Imaging Cherenkov detector (ARICH) has been designed to separate kaons from pions in the forward end-cap of the Belle II spectrometer. The detector will be placed in 1.5 T magnetic field and must have immunity to it. In ARICH R&D, we solve the problem with new equipment called Hybrid Avalanche Photo-Detector (HAPD) which developed by Hamamatsu Photonics. Recently the production of about 500 HAPDs was completed. We test HAPDs in magnetic field in KEK. We found some HAPDs have significant amount of dead time, which reaches up to 30% in the worst case. The dead time is caused by very large (more than 10,000 times larger than a single photon signal) and frequent (∼5 Hz) signals, which make electronics paralysed. The huge signals are observed in about 30% of HAPDs. To identify the origin and understand the mechanism, we perform some extra test of HAPDs. We find a strange dependence of the huge signals to the APD bias voltage. If we reduce the bias voltage applied to one of the 4 APDs by 10 V, the frequency of the huge signals is much reduced. On the other hand, if we reduce the voltage of all the 4 HAPDs, huge signals do not decrease, or even increase in some case. We also find the huge signals seems to be related to the vacuum inside HAPD. We present about the observation of the huge signals of HAPDs in the magnetic field, and our strategy to manage it.