The Compressed Baryonic Matter experiment at FAIR: physics of strangeness and charm, status of preparations

The Compressed Baryonic Matter (CBM) experiment at the future accelerator centre FAIR is being designed to investigate heavy-ion collisions in fixed-target mode at beam energies from 10 to 45 GeV/nucleon. The goal of the research program is to explore the QCD phase diagram in the region of highest baryon densities. The detector has to measure hadronic, leptonic and photonic observables with large acceptance. The interaction rates will be as high as 10 MHz in order to measure extremely rare probes like charm near threshold. The CBM detector concept, the physics programme with respect to heavy flavours and the results of feasibility studies are presented.