Speaker
Description
Relativistic heavy-ion collisions provide a unique opportunity to study
nuclear matter under extreme density and temperature.
NICA (Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility) is a new flagship project
aimed at the construction at JINR (Dubna) a modern machine providing
beams of heavy ions with the highest intensity ever
achieved in the energy range from 4 to 11 GeV per nucleon.
The main scientific goal of the NICA project is the experimental
exploration of a yet poorly known region of the QCD phase diagram
of the highest net-baryon density with an emphasis on the nature
of deconfinement phase transition, study of hadron properties in dense
baryonic matter, and search for the critical end point (CEP).
The study of strangeness production is of particular interest. Since
strange hadrons are initially not present but created during the
heavy-ion collisions, the strangeness is one among the most
sensitive probes for the deconfinement phase transition as well as
for the in-medium effects in dense nuclear matter.
The prospects for a study of strangeness and hypenuclei production
with the MultiPurpose Detector (MPD) at NICA will be presented and
the detector performance for such physics analyses, evaluated from
the Monte Carlo simulation, demonstrated.
