Status of the Time-of-Flight System of the MPD Experiment at the NICA Collider

New NICA accelerator complex at JINR (Dubna), based on the existing upgraded Nuclotron accelerator, will allow conducting all types of research in the field of high-energy physics. The main tasks of this project are study of the properties of the deconfinement phase transition, experimental investigation on medium modification of vector mesons, and search for the QCD critical end point. Thus, two interaction points are foreseen in the NICA collider: one for studying the collision of heavy ions on the Multipurpose detector MPD, the other for polarized beams for the experiment on the SPD installation. The ambitious physical goals of MPD require excellent particle identification at the maximum possible range of phase space. Identification of charged hadrons is achieved by combining time-of-flight measurements and dE/dx energy loss measurements from the time-projection camera TPC. The Time-of-Flight system is based on multigap resistive plate chambers (MRPC), which are successfully used to identify particles in similar experiments around the world. A production site has been organized at the Laboratory of High Energy Physics of JINR for serial production of TOF MPD modules including 10 MRPCs. This site includes the entire cycle of work from preparing materials for the assembly of detectors to testing the assembled modules on cosmic radiation. This report presents the structure of the TOF system, its main parameters, the current state and the results of decoding and processing data obtained at the module testing facility.