The CBM experiment—a status report

The CBM experiment is being designed to study strongly interacting matter at high densities with nuclear collisions up to 45 A GeV beam energy at the future FAIR centre. With interaction rates unprecedented in heavy-ion collisions, CBM will give access also to extremely rare probes and thus to the early stage of the collisions, in search for the first-order phase transition from confined to deconfinedmatter and the QCD critical point. The conceptual design of the experiment is consolidated, and the project has entered the R&D and technical design phase. We report on the project status, putting enphasis on recent progress and developments.