Ion Program of Na61/Shine at the CERN SPS

Understand

The NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN SPS aims to discover the critical point of strongly interacting matter and study properties of the onset of deconfinement.

• These goals will be reached by measurements of hadron production properties in nucleus-nucleus, proton-proton and proton-lead interactions as a function of collision energy and size of the colliding nuclei.
• Furthermore, NA61/SHINE will perform numerous precision measurements needed for neutrino (T2K) and cosmic-ray (Pierre Auger Observatory and KASCADE) experiments.
• This paper summarizes physics arguments for the NA61/SHINE ion program and presents the status and plans of the experiment.