The Compressed Baryonic Matter Experiment at FAIR

Abstract

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR aims to study the area of the QCD phase diagram at high net baryon densities and moderate temperatures using heavy-ion collisions. The FAIR accelerator will provide high-intensity heavy-ion beams up to Au ions in the beam momentum range 3.5A-12A GeV/c per nucleon. In order to achieve it's physics goals and to perform multi-differential measurements of rare probes such as multistrange hadrons or hypernuclei, CBM plans to operate at unprecedented peak interaction rates of up to 10 MHz.Following an introduction into the physics program of the CBM, recent developments related to the preparation of the experiment, physics performance studies, and detector components tests within the so-called FAIR PHASE-0 program are discussed. In particular, the status of the mCBM project at GSI, which operated with high-intensity beams for the first time last year and combines various CBM detector subsystems with a common data acquisition system (DAQ), are presented.