Abstract
The main task of the future Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM), to be operated at the FAIR facility at GSI, Darmstadt, is the exploration of the properties of super-dense nuclear matter. The search for in-medium modifications of hadrons, the study of the transition from dense hadronic matter to quark-gluon matter, and the possible location of a critical endpoint in the QCD phase diagram of strongly interacting matter are the most important physics goals of CBM. Detailed measurements of di-leptons stemming from low-mass vector-mesons and charmonium have a large potential to shed light on the existence of such effects.
The Ring Imaging Cherenkov detector of the CBM experiment aims at a clean and efficient electron identification. It is foreseen to use CO2 as radiator gas and equip the detector with a focussing mirror system and multi-anode photomultiplier tubes as photon detector. In this paper we present selected results of R&D studies and beam test measurements of the detector prototype performed in fall 2011 and 2012 at the CERN/PS with a mixed electron-pion beam.