The MPD detector at the NICA heavy-ion collider at JINR

Abstract The MultiPurpose Detector (MPD) is designed to study heavy-ion collisions at the Nuclotron-based heavy Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) at JINR, Dubna. Its main components located inside a superconducting solenoid are a tracking system composed of a silicon microstrip vertex detector followed by a large volume time-projection chamber, a time-of-flight system for particle identification and a barrel electromagnetic calorimeter. A zero degree hadron calorimeter is designed specifically to measure the energy of spectators. In this paper, all parts of the apparatus are described and their tracking and particle identification (PID) parameters are discussed in some detail.