Measurement of rare probes with the silicon tracking system of the CBM experiment at FAIR

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at FAIR will explore the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter at highest net baryon densities and moderate temperatures. The CBM physics program will be started with beams delivered by the SIS 100 synchrotron, providing energies from 2 to 14 GeV/nucleon for heavy nuclei, up to 14 GeV/nucleon for light nuclei, and 29 GeV for protons. The highest net baryon densities will be explored with ion beams up to 45 GeV/nucleon energy delivered by SIS 300 in the next stage of FAIR. Collision rates up to 10(7) per second are required to produce very rare probes with unprecedented statistics in this energy range. Their signatures are complex. These conditions call for detector systems designed to meet the extreme requirements in terms of rate capability, momentum and spatial resolution, and a novel DAQ and trigger concept which is not limited by latency but by throughput. In this paper we outline the concepts of CBM's central detector, the Silicon Tracking System, and of the First-Level Event Selector, a dedicated computing farm to reduce on-line the raw data volume by up to three orders of magnitude to a recordable rate. Progress with the development of detector and software algorithms are discussed and examples of performance studies on the reconstruction of rare probes at SIS 100 and SIS 300 energies given. (C) 2014 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.