Open Charm Measurements at CERN SPS Energies with the New Vertex Detector of the NA61/SHINE Experiment

The heavy-ion programme of the NA61/SHINE experiment at the CERN SPS has been expanded to allow precise measurements of exotic particles with short lifetime. The study of open charm meson production is a sensitive tool for new detailed investigations of the properties of hot and dense matter formed in nucleus-nucleus collisions. In particular, it offers new possibilities for studies of such phenomena as in-medium parton energy loss and quarkonium dissociation and possible regeneration, thus providing new information to probe deconfinement. A new high resolution Vertex Detector was designed for the NA61/SHINE experiment for measurements of the very rare processes of open charm production in nucleus-nucleus collisions at the SPS. It will meet the challenges of track registration and of very precise spatial resolution in primary and secondary vertex reconstruction required for the identification of $D^0$ mesons. A small-acceptance version of the Vertex Detector, the SAVD (Small Acceptance Vertex Detector), was installed last year with a Pb target in the Pb beam of 150 A GeV/c momentum, and a modest set of data was collected. The main goal of the ongoing data analysis was to observe a signal from $D^0$ mesons. The status of this analysis will be presented, discussing a number of challenges related to the tracking in the inhomogeneous magnetic field, the matching of SAVD tracks to TPCs tracks, and the extraction of physics results.