Probing the properties of dense nuclear matter with photon conversions at NICA

Abstract

Photons serve as valuable probes of the properties of the hot and dense nuclear matter created in collisions of heavy ions. Thermal photon spectra at RHIC and LHC energies indicate that the temperature of the produced medium far exceeds the temperature of the phase transition to the quark-gluon plasma in lattice QCD calculations. Measurements of thermal photon spectra in heavy ion collisions at lower energies at the future NICA collider may help to trace the transition from partonic to hadronic degrees of freedom. In this contribution, feasibility studies on thermal photon measurements using the photon conversion method in the future MPD experiment at NICA will be reviewed. In this work, a possibility to increase photon reconstruction efficiency with a dedicated conversion layer is presented and feasibility to probe the material budget of the experiment with converted photons is discussed.