CASTOR: A dedicated detector for the detection of centauros and strangelets at the LHC

We present a specialized detector system, CASTOR, which, as an integral part of the ALICE experiment, will search for centauros and strangelets in central Pb+Pb collisions at the LHC. CASTOR will cover the very forward, baryon-rich pseudorapidity region and will consist of a charged particle multiplicity detector, a photon multiplicity detector and a calorimeter with electromagnetic and hadronic sections. The physics motivation is presented, along with simulation results and the detector design. The influence of the background on the identification of centauro-type events is discussed.