The Compressed Baryonic Matter Experiment at FAIR: Progress with feasibility studies and detector developments

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment is being planned at the international research center FAIR, under realization next to the GSI laboratory in Darmstadt, Germany. Its physics programme addresses the QCD phase diagram in the region of highest net baryon densities. Of particular interest are the expected first order phase transition from partonic to hadronic matter, ending in a critical point, and modifications of hadron properties in the dense medium as a signal of chiral symmetry restoration. Laid out as a fixed-target experiment at the heavy-ion synchrotrons SIS-100/300, the detector will record both proton-nucleus and nucleus-nucleus collisions at beam energies between 10 and 45$A$ GeV. Hadronic, leptonic and photonic observables have to be measured with large acceptance. The interaction rates will reach 10 MHz to measure extremely rare probes like charm near threshold. Two versions of the experiment are being studied, optimized for either electron-hadron or muon identification, combined with silicon detector based charged-particle tracking and micro-vertex detection. The CBM physics requires the development of novel detector sytems, trigger and data acquisition concepts as well as innovative real-time reconstruction techniques. Progress with feasibility studies of the CBM experiment and the development of its detector systems are reported.Comment: 4 pages, 3 figures - FINAL - To appear in the conference proceedings for Quark Matter 2009, March 30 - April 4, Knoxville, Tennesse

A multi-zone muffle furnace design

A Multi-Zone Muffle-Tube Furnace was designed, built, and tested for the purpose of providing an in-house experience base with tubular furnaces for materials processing in microgravity. As such, it must not only provide the desired temperatures and controlled thermal gradients at several discrete zones along its length but must also be capable of sustaining the rigors of a Space Shuttle launch. The furnace is insulated to minimize radial and axial heat losses. It is contained in a water-cooled enclosure for purposes of dissipating un-wanted residual heat, keeping the outer surfaces of the furnace at a 'touch-safe' temperature, and providing a rugged housing. This report describes the salient features of the furnace, testing procedures and results, and concluding remarks evaluating the overall design

4-Dimensional cellular automaton track finder for the CBM experiment

The CBM experiment (FAIR/GSI, Darmstadt, Germany) will focus on the measurement of rare probes at interaction rates up to 10 MHz with data flow of up to 1 TB/s. It requires a novel read-out and data-acquisition concept with self-triggered electronics and free-streaming data. In this case resolving different collisions is not a trivial task and event building must be performed in software online. That requires full online event reconstruction and selection not only in space, but also in time, so-called 4D event building and selection. This is a task of the First-Level Event Selection (FLES).The FLES reconstruction and selection package consists of several modules: track finding, track fitting, short-lived particles finding, event building and event selection. The Cellular Automaton (CA) track finder algorithm was adapted towards time-slice-based reconstruction and included into the CBMROOT framework. In this article, we describe the modification done to the algorithm, as well as the performance of the developed time-based approach