R&D on long-strip MRPC
Multi-gap Resistive Plate Chamber (MRPC), which has excellent performance and relatively low cost per channel, is a good candidate for Time-of-Flight (TOF) system in modern high energy physics experiments. A new kind of MRPC, Long-strip MRPC (LMRPC) with 50 cm × 2.5 cm strips, was tested at GSI-FOPI with secondary beam. The resets show that this LMRPC prototype can achieve 60 to 70 ps σ time resolution and greater than 97% detecting efficiency. The cross talk between readout strips is less than 2%. The measured spatial resolution along the strips is about 0.36 cm σ.
The compressed baryonic matter experiment at FAIR
The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment will be one of the major scientific pillars of the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt. The goal of the CBM research program is to explore the QCD phase diagram in the region of high baryon densities using high-energy nucleus-nucleus collisions. This includes the study of the equation-of-state of nuclear matter at high densities, and the search for the deconfinement and chiral phase transitions. The CBM detector is designed to measure both bulk observables with large acceptance and rare diagnostic probes such as charmed particles and vector mesons decaying into lepton pairs.
Comparison of chemical freeze-out criteria in heavy-ion collisions
One of the most remarkable results to emerge from heavy-ion collisions over the past two decades is the striking regularity shown by particle yields at all energies. This has led to several very successful proposals describing particle yields over a very wide range of beam energies, reaching from $1A$ GeV up to 200A GeV, using only one or two parameters. A systematic comparison of these proposals is presented here. The conditions of fixed energy per particle, baryon+anti-baryon density, normalized entropy density as well as percolation model are investigated. The results are compared with the most recent chemical freeze-out parameters obtained in the thermal-statistical analysis of particle yields. The sensitivity and dependence of the results on parameters is analyzed and discussed. It is shown that in the energy range above the top energy of the BNL Alternating Gradient Synchrotron within present accuracies, all chemical freeze-out criteria give a fairly good description of the particle yields. However, the low energy heavy-ion data favor the constant energy per particle as a unified condition of chemical particle freeze-out. This condition also shows the weakest sensitivity on model assumptions and parameters.