The Inner Tracking System for the MPD Setup of the NICA Collider

The NICA-MPD tracking system includes the vertex silicon detector MPD-ITS designed for the efficient registration of short-lived products of nucleus-nucleus interactions. The MPD-ITS is planned to be built using the novel technology of monolithic active pixel sensors (MAPS) following the corresponding know-how transfer from CERN's ALICE-ITS2 project to a state of capability in order to create a large-area MAPS-only tracker for its implementation at NICA. Technique-wise, the ITS is arguably the most sophisticated and ambitious project among all other detector subsystems projects of the MPD. On the other hand, the measurements of heavy flavor probes produced in central heavy ion collisions at NICA collider would be otherwise impossible. This alone is a good reason to consider it a worthwhile effort. Specifically, particles with open charm, D mesons, and the Lambda(c) baryon, are currently considered as one of the most perspective probes for the search of quark deconfinement in the strongly compressed fireball during its critical transition from hadronic matter to quark-gluon plasma.