Hard and electromagnetic probes: plans for future measurements at the CERN SPS

TL;DR

This paper discusses future plans for measuring electromagnetic and hard probes at CERN SPS, focusing on experiments like NA61/SHINE and NA60+ to explore the Quark-Gluon Plasma through rare processes.

Contribution

It presents the physics motivation, current and planned experimental setups, and expected performance for future measurements of rare probes at CERN SPS.

Findings

NA61/SHINE plans to measure open charm production in Pb--Pb collisions.

NA60+ aims to study dimuon and heavy quark production with new spectrometers.

The experiments will explore the QGP phase diagram at specific baryonic chemical potentials.

Abstract

The CERN SuperProtoSynchrotron (SPS) represents an ideal facility for fixed-target heavy-ion experiments exploring the phase diagram of strongly interacting matter in the region $200\le\mu_{\rm B}\le500$ MeV. It can deliver high-intensity beams ($>10^6$ Pb/s), allowing a study of rare probes of the Quark-Gluon Plasma, including electromagnetic and hard processes. The NA61/SHINE experiment is currently active and plans to perform a first direct measurement of open charm production in Pb--Pb collisions at top SPS energy and possibly at lower energies. The project of a new experiment, NA60+, based on a muon spectrometer coupled to a vertex spectrometer is currently being developed, for the study of dimuon and heavy quark production, and a Letter of Intent was recently submitted. In this contribution the physics motivation for the studies of rare probes, the existing and planned experimental set-ups and their expected physics performance will be discussed.