The RICH system of the LHCb experiment: Status and performance

The LHCb experiment is a single forward arm spectrometer at the LHC at CERN. Particle identification (pion, kaon and proton discrimination) is a crucial requirement to meet the physics goals of the experiment. This is provided by two Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detectors providing particle identification coverage between 1 and 100 GeV/c. After a brief description of the LHCb experiment and RICH detectors, the results from the latest beam test using the final detector components and readout system will be given and the anticipated particle identification performance of the RICH detectors from Monte Carlo simulations will be presented. Finally, a technique to calibrate the particle identification performance of the RICH system with data using D* decays will be described