First measurement of charm meson production in lead-lead collisions at the CERN SPS

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The primary goal of the project is to measure charm meson productionin central Pb+Pb collisions at 150A GeV/c which will be recorded during the NA61/SHINE Pb run in November and December 2018. This will be the first direct measurement of open charm production in Pb+Pb collisions the CERN SPS energies. This measurement will be followed by precise measurements of open charm in Pb+Pb collisions at 40A, and 150A GeV/c in 2021-2024 (not covered by this project). Furthermore, within the project a final data reconstruction and analysis procedures related to the open charm measurements will be developed. The procedures will be used for the future NA61/SHINE open charm measurements.The new measurements will provide the long-awaited experimental information needed to answer the following questions-How does the formation of quark-gluon plasma impact charmonia production?-How does the onset of deconfinement impact open charm production?-What is the mechanism of open charm and charmonia production?The work program of the proposed project assumes that the DFG fundingwill start at the beginning 2019 and it will include funds for one post-doctoral and one doctoral researcher for three years.The researchers will work on the development of the reconstruction software, data quality cuts, simulation and data analysis. The project will be concluded by publication of the result on D-meson yield in central Pb+Pb collisions at 150A GeV/c.The NA61/SHINE group from the Goethe-University Frankfurt am Main was actively involved in the construction and tests of the Small Acceptance Vertex Detector, SAVD. SAVD was add to the NA61/SHINE set-up for the open charm measurements. Thus, the analysis of the first physics data from the SAVD performed at the Goethe University Frankfurt am Main Frankfurt would be the necessary culmination of the past hardware effort.