The PANDA Experiment will be one of the key experiments at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) which is under construction and currently being built on the area of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany.
The PANDA Collaboration with more than 420 scientist from 18 countries intends to do basic physics research on various topics around the weak and strong forces, exotic states of matter and the structure of hadrons. In order to gather all the necessary information from the antiproton-proton collisions a versatile detector will be build being able to provide precise trajectory reconstruction, energy and momentum measurements and very efficient identification of charged particles
Barrel DIRC
Excellent Particle IDentification (PID) is crucial to the success of the PANDA physics program. Using leading edge Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) technology will provide efficient and clean PID in the PANDA Target Spectrometer.
In contrast to conventional Ring Imaging Cherenkov (RICH) counters, DIRC detectors use high-precision quartz bars or plates as radiator material to produce the Cherenkov light. The Cherenkov photons are then captured by total internal reflection in the fused silica radiator and transported to photon detectors outside the path of particles to be measured there. This principle allows DIRC detectors to be much more compact than conventional Cherenkov detectors.
The Barrel DIRC will cover the polar angle range of 22-140 degrees and cleanly separate charged pions from kaons for momenta between 0.5 GeV/c and 3.5 GeV/c with a separation power of at least 3 standard deviations. The design is based on the successful BABAR DIRC and the SuperB FDIRC R&D with several important improvements to optimize the performance for PANDA, such as wider and shorter radiator bars, a spherical focusing lens system, fast timing, a compact fused silica prism as expansion region, and lifetime-enhanced MCP-PMTs for photon detection.
FLASH
The Fast Light Acquiring Start Hodoscope (FLASH) is a prototype detector to study fast timing techniques using Cherenkov light produced in fused silica bars. It uses the same technologies as the Barrel DIRC for light generation and detection. It therefore serves to demonstrate the performance of the developed readout electronics. In a test experiment at the CERN PS, a system resolution of ~70ps could be reached.