No Arabic abstract
The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt will provide unique research opportunities for the investigation of fundamental open questions related to nuclear physics and astrophysics, including the exploration of QCD matter under extreme conditions, which governs the structure and dynamics of cosmic objects and phenomena like neutron stars, supernova explosions, and neutron star mergers. The physics program of the Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment is devoted to the production and investigation of dense nuclear matter, with a focus on the high-density equation-of-state (EOS), and signatures for new phases of dense QCD matter. According to the present schedule, the CBM experiment will receive the first beams from the FAIR accelerators in 2025. This article reviews promising observables, outlines the CBM detector system, and presents results of physics performance studies.
The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt is designed to investigate the properties of high-density QCD matter with multi-differential measurements of hadrons and leptons, including rare probes like multi-strange anti-hyperons and charmed particles. The research program covers the study of the high-density equation-of-state of nuclear matter, and the exploration of the QCD phase diagram at large baryon-chemical potentials, including the search for quark matter and the critical endpoint of a hypothetical 1st order phase transition. The CBM setup comprises detector systems for the identification of charged hadrons, electrons, and muons, for the determination of collision centrality and the orientation of the reaction plane, and a free-streaming data read-out and acquisition system, which allows online reconstruction and selection of events up to reaction rates of 10 MHz. In this article, emphasis is placed on the measurement of muon pairs in Au-Au collisions at FAIR beam energies, which are unique probes to determine the temperature of the fireball, and, hence, to search for a caloric curve of QCD matter. Simultaneously, the subthreshold production of charmonium can be studied via its dimuon decay, in order to shed light on the microscopic structure of QCD matter at high baryon densities. The CBM setup with focus on dimuon measurements and results of the corresponding physics performance studies will be presented.
The future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is an accelerator-based international center for fundamental and applied research, which presently is under construction in Darmstadt, Germany. An important part of the program is devoted to questions related to astrophysics, including the origin of elements in the universe and the properties of strongly interacting matter under extreme conditions, which are relevant for our understanding of the structure of neutron stars and the dynamics of supernova explosions and neutron star mergers. The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR is designed to measure promising observables in high-energy heavy-ion collisions, which are expected to be sensitive to the high-density equation-of-state (EOS) of nuclear matter and to new phases of QCD matter at high densities. The CBM physics program, the relevant observables and the experimental setup will be discussed.
Substantial experimental and theoretical efforts worldwide are devoted to explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter. At LHC and top RHIC energies, QCD matter is studied at very high temperatures and nearly vanishing net-baryon densities. There is evidence that a Quark-Gluon-Plasma (QGP) was created at experiments at RHIC and LHC. The transition from the QGP back to the hadron gas is found to be a smooth cross over. For larger net-baryon densities and lower temperatures, it is expected that the QCD phase diagram exhibits a rich structure, such as a first-order phase transition between hadronic and partonic matter which terminates in a critical point, or exotic phases like quarkyonic matter. The discovery of these landmarks would be a breakthrough in our understanding of the strong interaction and is therefore in the focus of various high-energy heavy-ion research programs. The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR will play a unique role in the exploration of the QCD phase diagram in the region of high net-baryon densities, because it is designed to run at unprecedented interaction rates. High-rate operation is the key prerequisite for high-precision measurements of multi-differential observables and of rare diagnostic probes which are sensitive to the dense phase of the nuclear fireball. The goal of the CBM experiment at SIS100 (sqrt(s_NN) = 2.7 - 4.9 GeV) is to discover fundamental properties of QCD matter: the phase structure at large baryon-chemical potentials (mu_B > 500 MeV), effects of chiral symmetry, and the equation-of-state at high density as it is expected to occur in the core of neutron stars. In this article, we review the motivation for and the physics programme of CBM, including activities before the start of data taking in 2022, in the context of the worldwide efforts to explore high-density QCD matter.
The mission of the Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt is to explore the QCD phase diagram at high net baryon densities likely to exist in the core of neutron stars. The CBM detector system is designed to perform multi-differential measurements of hadrons and leptons in central gold-gold collisions at beam energies between 2 and 11 A GeV with unprecedented precision and statistics. In order to reduce the systematic errors of the lepton measurements, which generally suffer from a large combinatorial background, both electrons and muons will be measured with the same acceptance. Up to now, no di-muon measurements have been performed in heavy-ion collisions at beam energies below 158A GeV. The main device for electron identification, a Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) detector, can be replaced by a setup comprising hadron absorbers and tracking detectors for muon measurements. In order to obtain a complete picture of the reaction, it is important to measure simultaneously leptons and hadrons. This requirement is fulfilled for the RICH, which has a low material budget, and only little affects the trajectories of hadrons on their way to the Time-of-Flight (TOF) detector. In contrast, the simultaneous measurement of muons and hadrons within the same experimental acceptance poses a substantial challenge. This article reviews the simulated performance of the CBM experiment for muon identification, together with the possibility of simultaneous hadron measurements.
The protons and neutrons in a nucleus can form strongly correlated nucleon pairs. Scattering experiments, where a proton is knocked-out of the nucleus with high momentum transfer and high missing momentum, show that in 12C the neutron-proton pairs are nearly twenty times as prevalent as proton-proton pairs and, by inference, neutron-neutron pairs. This difference between the types of pairs is due to the nature of the strong force and has implications for understanding cold dense nuclear systems such as neutron stars.