RICH upgrade: Current status and future perspectives

The LHCb experiment is dedicated to precision measurements of CP violation and rare decays of B hadrons at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN (Geneva). The second long shutdown of the LHC is currently scheduled to begin in 2018. During this period the LHCb experiment with all its sub-detectors will be upgraded in order to run at an instantaneous luminosity of 2×10$^{33}$ cm$^{−2}$s$^{−1}$ and to read out data at a rate of 40MHz into a flexible software-based trigger. The Ring Imaging CHerenkov (RICH) system will require new photon detectors and modifications of the optics of the upstream detector. Tests of the prototype of the smallest constituent of the new RICH system have been performed during testbeam sessions at the Test Beam Facility SPS North Area (CERN) in Autumn 2014.