The MPD apparatus has been designed as a 4π spectrometer capable of detecting of charged hadrons, electrons and photons in heavy-ion collisions at high luminosity in the energy range of the NICA collider. To reach this goal, the detector will comprise a precise 3-D tracking system and a high-performance particle identification (PID) system based on the time-of-flight measurements and calorimetry.
The basic design parameters has been determined by physics processes in nuclear collisions at NICA and by several technical constrains guided by a trade-of of efficient tracking and PID against a reasonable material budget. At the design luminosity, the event rate in the MPD interaction region is about 6 kHz; the total charged particle multiplicity exceeds 1000 in the most central Au+Au collisions at √sNN = 11 GeV. As the average transverse momentum of the particles produced in a collision at NICA energies is below 500 MeV/c, the detector design requires a very low material budget. The general layout of the MPD apparatus is shown in Fig. 1. The whole detector setup includes Central Detector (CD) covering ±2 units in pseudorapidity (η).