Kina - Joint Norwegian/Chinese R&D in data aquisition and trigger concepts for the CBM experiment at FAIR/GSI

The exploration of the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter is one of the most challenging fields of modern high-energy physics. At ultra-relativistic beam energies provided by RHIC and the future LHC, one can expect partonic matter to be produced at very high temperatures and at small baryon chemical potentials. Similar conditions prevailed in the early universe. The complementary situation exists in the core of a neutron star: here the baryon density is very high and the temperature very low. Th is region of the QCD phase diagram has not been studied in detail so far. The proposed Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future FAIR facility at GSI, Germany, will explore the high baryon density region of the QCD phase diagram. The expe rimental task is to identify both hadrons and leptons and to detect rare probes in a heavy ion environment. The challenge is to select very rare probes in Au+Au (or U+U) collisions at reaction rates of up to 10**7 events per second, requiring a high speed event-selection and data acquisition system. The Institute of Particle Physics, Huazhong Normal University, Wuhan, China, and the Nuclear Physics Group at the Institute of Physics and Technology, University of Bergen, Bergen, Norway, plan to start a ne w collaboration with the aim of a joint R&D project for the new CBM experiment at the FAIR facility at GSI. Both universities are members of the CBM collaboration. Based on the expertise gained in our previous joint work on front-end electronics and DAQ for the PHOS detector in ALICE, we plan to participate in the DAQ and event selection R&D for CBM. A proposal to funding agencies in both countries will we prepared. The project will be embedded in the International Research Training Group (IRTG - forsker skole) "Intelligent Detectors" which started in October 2004 and has an antipicated duration of nine years.