European Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR): the new international center for fundamental physics and its research program

The Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) accelerator center at Darmstadt, Germany, will provide the international scientific community with unique experimental opportunities of a scope and scale out of reach for any other large-scale facility in the world. With its staff of over 2500, it is expected to fundamentally expand our knowledge of hadron, nuclear, and atomic physics and their application to cosmology, astrophysics, and technology. In this review, the design details of the accelerator complex are discussed and the experimental research program for FAIR is presented. Particular attention is paid to experiments on the extreme state of matter arising from the isochoric heating of a material by heavy-ion beams. One of the largest facilities of its kind in Europe, FAIR is a part of the strategic development roadmap for the European Strategic Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI).