The compressed baryonic matter experiment at FAIR

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM) will be based at the new Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), which will deliver heavy-ion beams up to energies of 14 A GeV. In nucleus-nucleus collisions at these beam energies strongly interacting matter with densities up to 10 times normal nuclear matter is expected to be produced. The key objective of CBM is to investigate the QCD phase diagram in the region of high baryon-densities, where a first order phase transition from hadronic to partonic matter as well as a chiral phase transition is expected to occur, representing a substantial discovery potential at FAIR energies. As a fixed-target experiment CBM is consequently designed to cope with very high interaction rates up to 10 MHz. This will allow to perform high precision measurements of extremely rare probes which have not been accessible by previous nucleus-nucleus experiments in this energy regime. To achieve the high rate capability CBM will be equipped with fast and radiation hard detectors employing with free-streaming readout electronics. A high-speed Data Aquisition system will forward data from the detector front-ends to the First Level Event Selector (FLES), providing an online event selection. We report on the current status of the CBM experiment and its subsystems.