Speaker
Description
The Multi-Purpose Detector (MPD) is the first experiment at the
NICA Collider, which is in construction at the Joint Institute for
Nuclear Research in Dubna. During initial stage of operation the
complex
will study collisions of heavy ions in for sqrt(s_NN) of 4-11 GeV,
with Bi+Bi collisions at 9.2 GeV, in particular planned for first run.
It is expected that an excited QCD matter with high baryonic density
will be created in these collisions. In this talk I will present the
general MPD capabilities to study this exotic state of matter.
MPD is an international collaboration consisting of 44 institutions
from 13 countries. The construction and commissioning of the detector
is planned for 2022 and 2023, with the first data expected in
2023. The status of all subsystem preparations as well as their design
performance will be presented. MPD aims to study the phase diagram of
QCD matter at maximum baryonic density, determine the nature of the
phase transition between the deconfined and hadronic matter and search
for the critical end point. The physics programme, with emphasis on
potential first physics measurements with initial beams will be
discussed and it will be shown how MPD results can be used to
characterize the QCD matter created in heavy-ion collisions, including
the relevance of these investigations to other physics areas such
as astrophysics, particle physics and neutron star composition.
The already existing Baryonic Matter at Nuclotron (BM@N) experiment is
being upgraded for measurements of Au+Au collisions up to a kinetic
beam energy of 3.8A GeV in order to investigate the equation-of-state
and the microscopic degrees-of-freedom of QCD matter at neutron star
core densities.
