NICA (Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAсility) is a new accelerator complex designed at the Joint Institute for Nuclear Research (Dubna, Russia) to study properties of dense baryonic matter.
After puting the NICA collider into operation JINR scientists will be able to create in the Laboratory a special state of matter in which our Universe stayed shortly after the Big Bang – the Quark-Gluon Plasma (QGP).
Start of the construction: 2013.
Commissioning: 2023.
Scientific problems
The most important fundamental problems in this area are:
- The nature and properties of strong interactions between elementary constituents
of the Standard Model of particle physics – quarks and gluons
- The search for signs of the phase transition between hadronic matter and QGP;
search for new phases of baryonic matter
- Study of basic properties of the strong interaction vacuum and QCD symmetries
Accelerator and Detectors
NICA will provide variety of beam species ranged from protons and polarized deuterons to very massive gold ions. Heavy ions will be accelerated up to kinetic energy of 4.5 GeV per nucleon, the protons – up to 12.6 GeV. The heart of the NICA complex is the upgraded accelerator "Nuclotron" (have being working at JINR from 1993). The two interaction points are foreseen at the NICA collider rings: one for heavy-ion studies with the MPD detector and another for polarized beams for the SPD experiment.
