Joint CBM/STAR Meeting

[based on STAR Newsletter contribution by Geary Eppley]

The STAR Collaboration and the Compressed Baryonic Matter Collaboration held a joint workshop in the historic art deco clock tower auditorium at the Technische Universitat Darmstadt on Saturday March 18. CBM
and STAR are collaborating on an endcap time-of-flight detector for the Beam Energy Scan phase II at RHIC, scheduled for 2019-2020. The eTOF upgrade will greatly enhance the physics reach for BES-II and provide a full-scale integration and systems test for almost 10% of the planned CBM TOF system. The joint CBM-STAR project is part of the FAIR Phase 0 program to test detector components prior to the completion of CBM and the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research accelerator at GSI Darmstadt, scheduled for 2025.
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This first CBM-STAR joint workshop attracted 48 physicists from the US, China, and Europe. The sixteen presentations during the one-day Saturday session covered topics of interest for BES-II, CBM, and HADES from both an experimental and theory point of view. Geary Eppley convened the opening session which mostly focussed on some of the relevant hardware advances towards BES-II. Daniel Brandenburg and Florian Seck (who visited Rice in the Fall of 2016) presented the plans for dilepton measurements and recent theory developments, respectively. Frank Geurts discussed improvements and opportunities in bulk spectra.

The workshop was delicious as well. The organizers provided a sumptuous Italian buffet for lunch and a traditional Hessian buffet Saturday evening. There was also a productive discussion session Sunday morning following the workshop. The CBM Collaboration meeting began Monday. There was a construction readiness review of MRPC production for the eTOF modules. Construction of the first batch, about 10% of the 108 MRPCs needed for the full eTOF, is scheduled to begin this May. A complete sector of eTOF, covering one TPC sector, will be installed at STAR for Run 18. The second CBM-STAR joint workshop is scheduled in conjunction with the next CBM collaboration meeting in Wuhan, September 25-29.