NICA project — Challenges and tasks

The project of Nuclotron-based Ion Collider fAcility (NICA) is being under development at JINR (Dubna). The general goals of the project are providing of 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 report contains description of the facility scheme and characteristics in heavy ion operation mode, MPD detector scheme and characteristics, status and plans of the project development. A high emphasis is placed on the problems of high brightness beam formation and providing of a high luminosity of the NICA collider. To reach the project luminosity at heavy ion collisions an application of particle beams´ cooling methods — both electron and stochastic ones, is proposed and being developed.