The COMPASS experiment and the measurement of the gluon polarisation

The new COMPASS fixed target experiment at CERN, aimed at the study of nucleon spin structure and hadron spectroscopy, has started to collect physics data in autumn 2001. This paper describes the COMPASS apparatus and the measurement of the gluon polarisation Delta G/G. The apparatus consists in a solid state polarised target and a two stage spectrometer with high resolution tracking, particle identification and calorimetry, capable of standing high event rates. COMPASS measures the longitudinal spin asymmetry of open charm production in polarised deep inelastic muon nucleon scattering: this asymmetry is directly related to Delta G since at COMPASS energies open charm is essentially produced by photon gluon fusion only. A second channel, used to access Delta G with higher statistics, is the production of correlated high p/sub T/ hadron pairs. (5 refs).