Design and performance simulation of a segmented-absorber based muon detection system for high energy heavy ion collision experiments

A muon detection system (MUCH) based on a novel concept using a segmented and instrumented absorber has been designed for high-energy heavy-ion collision experiments. The system consists of 6 hadron absorber blocks and 6 tracking detector triplets. Behind each absorber block a detector triplet is located which measures the tracks of charged particles traversing the absorber. The performance of such a system has been simulated for the CBM experiment at FAIR (Germany) that is scheduled to start taking data in heavy ion collisions in the beam energy range of 6-45 A GeV from 2019. The muon detection system is mounted downstream to a Silicon Tracking System (STS) that is located in a large aperture dipole magnet which provides momentum information of the charged particle tracks. The reconstructed tracks from the STS are to be matched to the hits measured by the muon detector triplets behind the absorber segments. This method allows the identification of muon tracks over a broad range of momenta including tracks of soft muons which do not pass through all the absorber layers. Pairs of oppositely charged muons identified by MUCH could therefore be combined to measure the invariant masses in a wide range starting from low mass vector mesons (LMVM) up to charmonia. The properties of the absorber (material, thickness, position) and of the tracking chambers (granularity, geometry) have been varied in simulations of heavy-ion collision events generated with the UrQMD generator and propagated through the setup using the GEANT3, the particle transport code. The tracks are reconstructed by a Cellular Automaton algorithm followed by a Kalman Filter. The simulations demonstrate that low mass vector mesons and charmonia can be clearly identified in central Au+Au collisions at beam energies provided by the international Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR).