Beam test results of a C/sub 4/F/sub 8/O gas radiator Cherenkov detector using multi-anode photomultiplier tubes

We present the main results from a beam test done at Fermilab of a novel gaseous RICH detector that uses Hamamatsu multi-anode photomultiplier tubes (MAPMT) as photon detectors and a new gas C/sub 4/F/sub 8/O as a Cherenkov radiator. A novel front end electronics ASIC has been developed geared towards reading out the charge signals from the photon detectors. The ASIC features low noise and high dynamic range and is suitable for data driven architecture. The data acquisition system was developed to read 52 MAPMTs. An external trigger was used and the events were built using the time stamp information provided by the readout chips. We report the number of detected photons, the angular resolution per photon and the resolution per track after averaging over the photons. We also compare our measurements with simulations.