The HERMES recoil photon detector and the study of deeply virtual Compton scattering

The study of deeply virtual Compton scattering (DVCS) gives information about the contribution of the quark orbital angular momentum to the spin of the proton. DVCS has been studied at the HERMES experiment at DESY in Hamburg. Here 27.6 GeV longitudinally polarized electrons and positrons were scattered off a gaseous proton target. For the analysis of DVCS the recoiling proton could not be detected, but was reconstructed via its missing mass. This method suffers, however, from a 14% background contribution, mainly originating from associated DVCS. In this process the proton does not stay in its ground state but is excited to a Delta+ resonance. In order to reduce the background contribution down to less than 1%, a recoil detector was installed in the HERMES experiment beginning of 2006. This detector consists of three subcomponents, of which one is the photon detector. The main function of the photon detector is the detection of Delta+ decay photons. The photon detector was started up and commissioned for the analysis of (associated) DVCS. Subsequently DVCS and associated DVCS were analyzed using the recoil detector