In order to understand the partonic EOS of matter created at RHIC,
one needs to study both the collectivity of the produced matter and
the degree of thermalization. Anisotropic flow measurements have
already demonstrated the development of partonic collectivity at
RHIC [1], and now it is necessary to address the issue of quark
thermalization. Since the masses of the heavy flavor quarks are
larger than the possible excitations of the system created in the
collision, their collective motion could be used to indicate the
degree of thermalization of the light flavor quarks (u-,d-, s-).
The Heavy Flavor Tracker (HFT), a tracking upgrade of the STAR experiment, is being designed to provide an unambiguous measurement of charm quark flow through the direct reconstruction of the D0. The measurement requires high accuracy space points near the collision vertex. The current design
of our detector uses a novel CMOS based sensor, allowing for a low mass and high resolution detector element. We will present the design of the proposed detector, and also discuss its expected performance.
[1] Phys. Rev. Lett. 86 (2001) 402