On 2 February, the first physical run of the BM@N Heavy-Ion Experiment finished, during which the scientific team of the experiment was able to collect more than 550 million events. The experiment, in fact, became the first step in the implementation of the physical programme of the NICA Complex.

The BM@N Experiment run took place during the fourth commissioning cycle at the NICA Complex, which started in September 2022. In the current run, the facility was already working in its almost maximum configuration and collecting data for the Baryonic Matter at Nuclotron experiment of the same name: this is a target programme for which it was created.

Thanks to the coordinated work of the team of the Accelerator Department of the Laboratory of High Energy Physics JINR and the experiment team, more than 550 million events of a collision of a xenon beam with a fixed target were collected. “This number of events is several times higher than that of the previous technical runs. And taking into account a better selection of events during collisions, there will be dozens of times more interesting data,” Sergei Merts, a senior researcher at VBLHEP JINR, said. The result obtained is actually the first step in the implementation of the physical programme of the NICA Megascience Project.

Now the BM@N experiment team will have a long and arduous work on data processing and physical analysis.