The CBM experiment at FAIR

The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment (CBM) is being constructed at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research FAIR. Using nucleus-nucleus collisions at beam energies up to 14 A GeV during the first stage and up to 45 AGeV in a second stage, the key objective of CBM is to investigate the QCD phase diagram in the region of high net-baryon-densities. At this region a first order phase transition from hadronic to partonic matter as well as a chiral phase transition is expected, 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 which will allow to study extremely rare probes with high precision which have not been accessible by previous nucleus-nucleus experiments at this energy regime. To achieve the high rate capability CBM will be equipped with fast and radiation hard detectors readout by free-streaming electronics. The high-speed data acquisition system will transport data volumes up to 1 TB/s to a large scale computer farm providing a first level event selection. An overview on the CBM experiment as well as the progress on the detector projects is given.