Three stages of the NICA accelerator complex

The Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) project is under development at JINR (Dubna). The general goals of the project are to provide colliding beams for experimental studies of both hot and dense strongly interacting baryonic matter and spin physics (in collisions of polarized protons and deuterons). The first program will require the running of heavy-ion mode in the energy range of GeV at luminosities up to cm(-2) s(-1) for Au-197(79) nuclei (see details in sect. 4). This stage of the project will be preceded by fixed target experiments with the heavy-ion beam to be extracted from the Nuclotron at kinetic energies up to 4.5 GeV/u. The polarized beam mode is proposed to be used in the energy range of GeV (protons) at luminosities up to cm(-2) s(-1). This report contains a brief description of the facility scheme and characteristics in the heavy-ion operation mode, the description of the MultiPurpose Detector (MPD), and characteristics of the reactions of the colliding ions, which will allow us to detect the mixed phase formation. The plans and status of the project development are presented.