Calibration of the Aerogel Tiles for the HELIX RICH

HELIX (High Energy Light Isotope eXperiment) is a balloon-borne experiment designed to measure the chemical and isotopic abundances of light cosmic ray nuclei, especially the ¹⁰Be/⁹Be ratio over the energy range from 0.2 GeV/n to beyond 3 GeV/n. This is a key measurement for constraining cosmic-ray propagation models. The detector is a mass spectrometer, which is built around a 1 Tesla superconducting magnet and a high-resolution tracking system to determine particle rigidity. Time-of-flight counters and a ring-imaging Cherenkov detector (RICH) are used to measure velocities. The proximity-focused RICH consists of a radiator made of aerogel tiles (refractive index approximately 1.15) and a detector plane of silicon photomultipliers. For discrimination of the ⁹Be and ¹⁰Be isotopes at high energy, the refractive index of the aerogel must be known to a precision of 0.07%. Given the manufacturing tolerances in the production process, the index must be mapped over the lateral extent of aerogel tiles on a fine grid. In this contribution, we describe and show initial results from procedures developed for this task. These include laser-deflection and electron-beam measurements.