Operation of the CGEM Detector

A ten years extension of the data taking of BESIII experiment, recently approved, motivated an upgrade program both for the leptonic collider BEPCII and for some of the sub-detectors of the spectrometer. BESIII is a multipurpose spectrometer optimized for physics in the charm-τ energy region. In particular, the current inner drift chamber is suffering from aging and the proposal is to replace it with a detector based on Cylindrical Gas Electron Multiplier (CGEM) technology to improve both the secondary vertex reconstruction and the radiation tolerance. The CGEM Inner Tracker will be composed of three coaxial layers of cylindrical triple GEMs, operating in an Ar + iC4H10 (90:10) gas mixture with field and gain optimized to maximize the spatial resolution. The new detector is readout with innovative TIGER electronics produced in 110 nm CMOS technology. A cosmic telescope instrumented with two out of three layers is in operation in Beijing since January 2020, remotely controlled by Italian groups due to the pandemic situation. A dedicated readout chain was developed for data acquisition. In this paper, the general status of the project will be presented with a particular focus on the preliminary results from the cosmic data taking and future plans.