Developing high-performance DIRC detector for the future Electron Ion Collider experiment

The Electron-Ion Collider (EIC) will be the next frontier project of nuclear physics in the United States. It is planned to be built in the Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) in close collaboration with Jefferson Lab. One of the key requirement for the EIC central detector is excellent particle identification (PID). A detector using the Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) principle, with a radial size of only 7–8 cm, is a very attractive solution for identification of the hadrons in the final state. The R&D program performed by the EIC PID collaboration (eRD14) is focused on designing a high-performance DIRC (hpDIRC) detector that would extend the momentum coverage well beyond the state-of-the-art 3 standard deviations or more separation of π/K up to 6 GeV/c, e/π up to 1.8 GeV/c, and p/K up to 10 GeV/c. Key components of the hpDIRC detector are a 3-layer compound lens and small pixel-size photo-sensors. This article describes the status of the high-performance DIRC R&D for the EIC detector, with a focus on efforts towards developing and validating the radiation hard 3-layer lens.