The CBM experiment at FAIR

The CBM experiment will investigate heavy-ion collisions at beam energies from 8 to 45 AGeV at the future accelerator facility FAIR from 2015 on. The goal is to study the QCD phase diagram in the region of moderate temperatures and highest net-baryon densities in search of the first-order phase transition from confined to deconfined matter and the QCD critical point. CBM will cover hadronic, leptonic and photonic observables at extreme interaction rates, thus having access to rarest probes like charm near threshold. We will present the detector concept, results of feasibility studies and the status of preparations.