Towards the heavy-ion program at J-PARC

Sako, Hiroyuki   ; Chujo, Tatsuya*; Gunji, Taku*; Harada, Hiroyuki  ; Imai, Kenichi; Kaneta, Masashi*; Kinsho, Michikazu  ; Liu, Y.*; Nagamiya, Shoji; Nishio, Katsuhisa   ; Ozawa, Kyoichiro*; Saha, P. K.   ; Sakaguchi, Takao*; Sato, Susumu  ; Tamura, Jun  

Recently, a heavy-ion program as a future J-PARC project has been discussed. The main goals of the program are to explore the QCD phase diagram at highbaryon density with heavy ions up to uranium at the beam energies of around 10A GeV. We are planning to focus on the electron and muon measurements and rare probe search such asmulti-strangeness and charmed hadrons with high beam rates at J-PARC. A heavy-ionacceleration scheme has been considered with a new heavy-ion linac and a new booster ring, with the existing 3-GeV Rapid-Cycling Synchrotron, and the 30-GeV Main Ring synchrotron. An overview of the heavy-ion program and accelerator design, as well as physics goals and conceptual design of the experiments are presented.