Muon detection in the CBM experiment at FAIR

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future FAIR accelerator at Darmstadt is being designed for a comprehensive measurement of hadron and lepton production in heavy-ion collisions from 8/35 A GeV beam energy, producing events with large track multiplicity and high hit density. The CBM muon detection system is designed to measure muon pairs from the decay of vector mesons (ρ,ω,φ, J/ψ). The experimental challenge for muon measurements in heavy-ion collisions at FAIR energies is to identify low momentum muons in an environment of high particle densities. The CBM concept is to track the particles through a hadron absorber system and to perform a momentum dependent muon identification. This concept is realized by segmenting the hadron absorber in several layers and placing triplets of tracking detector planes in the gaps between the absorber layers. The track finding algorithm is based on the track following and the Kalman filter methods, using tracks reconstructed in the STS as initial seeds. The concept for the MUCH detector and the physics performance are presented in this contribution.