Welcome to the PANDA Experiment Website

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 central part of FAIR is a synchrotron complex providing intense pulsed ion beams (from p to U). Antiprotons produced by a primary proton beam will then be filled into the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) which collide with the fixed target inside the PANDA Detector.

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

Currently the collaboration with Russian Institutes is suspended. For details see statement from GSI.

Johann Zmeskal (1955 - 2024) - a calming pole in experiments


Dr. Johann Zmeskal

Hannes Zmeskal passed away on July 23, 2024 after a short severe disease. With Hannes we lose an unparalleled experienced researcher in the field of exotic atoms and experimental low-energy hadron physics. His work manifested in many important publications. He was a driving force in experiments on muon/pion experiments and low-energy kaon nuclear physics. His success in acquiring third party funding is remarkable – he was principal investigator in projects of the Austrian Science Fund and in the European research activities like Strong2020.
There is a possibility of expressing condolences online.

I know him since 1980 when I joined a research group at Paul Scherrer Institute (SIN at this time) in Switzerland.  Johann Zmeskal was a specialist of all kind of cryogenic targets and detector systems used in experiments on muon catalyzed fusion, the nuclear  fusion is resulting from the strong binding of 
two deuterons or deuteron-triton using a negatively charged muon which is released after the fusion process with a high probability and can start another fusion cycle. The finding of hyperfine effects in the molecular formation was topic of his PhD work - a big success and it is published in Phys. Rev. A.
He was member of many Collaborations like SIDDHARTA, ASACUSA and PANDA. In the PANDA experiment he contributed to the target system from the beginning but he was also working on the time-of-flight system. Due to his experience in cryogenic and ultrahigh vacuum systems he contributed to low-energy antiproton physics in experiment at the antimatter facility of CERN.
He was a leading figure in the experiments DEAR, SIDDHARTA and SIDDHARTA2 at Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati of INFN from the beginning of the electron-positron collider DAFNE operation.
Hannes Zmeskal was finally co-spokesperson of the very successful SIDDHARTA2 experiment on kaonic deuterium which is after the kaon-hydrogen experiment a key experiment to study the strong interaction at lowest energies  in an exotic atom with strangeness.
Hannes Zmeskal with his patient, kind and optimistic nature was always a calming pole in any of his many experiments. It has to be highlighted that Hannes was an extremely good mentor for a new generation of researchers.
Loved by all who knew him, he will be missed.

Johann Marton

Carlo Guaraldo (1938 - 2024) - a key figure of LNF


Prof. Dr. Carlo Guaraldo at the office

With great sadness we have received the message, that Carlo Guaraldo passed away.
He was a great hadron physicist and one like nobody else who was building bridges between people and who paved the way into the future.
We will miss him vey much and keep his memory.

Carlo Guaraldo (1938-2024) was a key figure and a pillar of the Laboratori Nazionali di Frascati (LNF) of the Italian Institute of Nuclear Physics (INFN), as well as of the European hadronic physics community.

Born in Torino, Guaraldo studied physics at Sapienza University in Rome, and his scientific interest was the understanding of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD). 

He began his scientific career in the 1960s at the Frascati Laboratories, where he investigated the nuclear structure by studying pion scattering on various nuclei and a wide range of photoreactions. He eventually became the head of the local facility LEALE (Laboratorio Esperienze Acceleratore Lineare Elettroni) where these activities were conducted.

A member of the Torino-Frascati-Dubna collaboration (TOFRADUP) and leader of the ALFA3 project, Guaraldo started participating in experiments at the CERN Low Energy Antiproton Ring in the 1980s. He was involved in PS179 and later in the OBELIX (PS201) experiment, where he and Tullio Bressani from Torino University served as spokesmen. The OBELIX experiment aimed to conduct spectroscopy of exclusive hadronic states produced via antiproton and antineutron interactions under various conditions. Guaraldo was a driving force in the collaboration, proposing several research lines including Pontecorvo reactions and exotic hadron spectroscopy, with particular interest in the H-dibaryon and the E/iota resonance.

In the 1990s, Guaraldo supported the realization of the DAFNE complex. He played a crucial role in defining the scientific program for the new facility and, along with Bressani, secured approval for a nuclear physics program at DAFNE, initially intended solely for CP-violation and fundamental symmetries studies. After contributing to the approval of the FINUDA experiment (Fisica NUcleare a DAfne), he shifted focus to establish a new research line: the study of kaonic atoms. This research has been enduring, extending the scientific life of the facility to the present days. Guaraldo served as spokesperson for the DEAR and SIDDHARTA experiments, which achieved the world most precise measurements on kaonic atoms.

At the turn of the millennium, Guaraldo was a pioneer in promoting cooperative efforts across the hadron physics community. He initiated and led a series of successful projects funded by the EU commission, coordinating the HadronPhysics, HadronPhysics2, and HadronPhysics3 initiatives from 2004 to 2014. These projects provided open access to six world-class experimental facilities (COSY, MAMI, LNF, ELSA, GSI/FAIR, and CERN) and the European Centre for Theoretical Physics ECT* in Trento, fostering new developments in hadron physics. This was certainly the most complex and challenging managerial activity Carlo Guaraldo pursued, but having been involved in many other important committees, he was well trained for this role.

Guaraldo's extensive managerial experience included serving on the INFN Management Board, the Program Advisory Committee of FZ Jülich, and the executive board of the DIRAC (PS212) CERN experiment. He was involved in financial working groups for the FAIR project in Darmstadt and the X-FEL project in Hamburg, and held roles in cooperative activities between INFN and various international organizations such as the Institute for Nuclear Physics (INP) in Novosibirsk, the Moscow Meson Factory Troizk, the Institute for Theoretical and Experimental Physics (ITEP) in Moscow, and the Institute for Research and Development for Physics and Nuclear Engineering (IFIN-HH) in Bucharest.

Beyond his professional achievements, Carlo Guaraldo was known as a kind and friendly person with broad cultural interests. Curious and open-minded, he was a mountain lover and a tenacious cyclist. His presence will be missed, along with the coffee he made with his own moka machine for visitors to his office.

Paola Gianotti

PANDA PhD Prize 2023


Anna Alicke received the PANDA PhD Prize 2023
during the Collaboration Meeting in Münster


The PANDA PhD Prize 2023 was awarded to Anna Alicke (FZ Jülich/Germany) for her thesis “Development of fast track finding algorithms for densely packed straw tube trackers and its application to Ξ hyperon reconstruction for the PANDA experiment". In the course of her thesis, she developed two new tracking algorithms and combined these primary and secondary trackers to achieve the highest efficiency, which was tested on reactions with multiple secondary vertices. But the algorithm can also be used for other densely packed straw tube trackers. The prize was presented by the spokesperson during the PANDA Collaboration Dinner in Münster on March 6, 2024.

The Panda Collaboration has awarded the PhD Prize once per year since 2013 in order to honor the best dissertation written in connection with the Panda Experiment. In her dissertation, Physicist Anna Alicke studied hyperon production and reactions within the Panda detector, which is being built at the FAIR accelerator facility.

The Panda Collaboration awards the PhD Prize to specifically honor students’ contributions to the Panda project. Candidates for the PhD Prize are nominated by their doctoral advisors. In addition to being directly related to the Panda Experiment, the nominees’ doctoral degrees must have received a rating of “very good” or better. Up to three candidates are shortlisted for the award and can present their dissertations at the Panda Collaboration meeting. The winner is chosen by a committee that is appointed for this task by the Panda Collaboration.

Book of Condolences for Helmut Koch


Prof. Dr. Helmut Koch at the Collaboration
Meeting 2018, where he received the
PANDA Lifetime Membership Award.

On April 8th, 2024 our friend, colleague, teacher and mentor Helmut Koch has died. 

It was a shocking moment for many of us when we realized that Helmut Koch is no longer with us. We learnt so much from him and knew him as an excellent scientist, teacher, mentor, leader and a very friendly person. We will always remember him for his gentle, human nature and for his numerous contributions to the field of hadron physics.

Many of us have stories with or about him to share or just want to express their feelings and thoughts.

Therefore we prepared an online Book of Condolences which we want to hand over at the end to his wife.

Please, slow down your daily routine for a moment and share some memories with us. You can do so very easily if you are logged in: Just follow this link. If you have photos from Helmut Koch, you can share them as well. They will be visible by PANDA users only, whereas the condolence text is readable for anybody. 

In case of technical problems, please contact Udo.   

Helmut Koch (1941-2024) - a committed hadron physicist

Helmut Koch began his physics studies at the Technical University of Aachen in 1960. The 1960s were also the time in which the quark model was developed and accelerators continued to deliver new, surprising results. It is not known whether this motivated Helmut Koch to devote himself to strong interaction, i.e. the physics of quarks and gluons, but he devoted the rest of his scientific life to this subject.

At CERN, in Prof. Backenstoss' group, he therefore devoted himself to exotic atoms, in which for example the electron was replaced by a pion and the strong interaction influences the orbits of the pions. His dissertation was entitled "Determination of the width of pionic 2p levels from intensity measurements on 2p-1s X-ray lines.”.

After strange quarks became available, Helmut Koch investigated kaonic atoms and hypernuclei at the first low-energy kaon beam at the CERN PS. The subsequent availability of antimatter in the form of antiprotons immediately began to fascinate him. He co-authored a publication on the “Observation of Antiprotonic Atoms”. Antiprotons were with him ever since and the search for exotic forms of matter determined his research from then on. He searched for baryonium states at CERN, and very quickly recognized the potential of a new storage ring for antiprotons, the Low Energy Antiproton Ring (LEAR).

The presence of cooled, background-free antiprotons allowed the study of the strong interaction to be taken to a whole new level. The annihilation of quarks and antiquarks in the form of protons with antiprotons to gluons is a unique way to understand the strong interaction. A detector based on modern high-energy experiments, the Crystal Barrel Detector, was installed at LEAR under Helmut Koch's leadership. From then on, there was a new quality feature for the spectroscopic investigation of hadrons with light quarks. As a well-known particle physicist at CERN, Lucien Montanet, once remarked only half-jokingly, the quality criterion "4-star resonance" only existed if the particle had been observed accordingly by Crystal Barrel. Many high-quality publications resulted from the experiment during its seven-year run.

At the same time, Helmut Koch was planning for the time after Crystal Barrel. He was a member of a study group that wanted to build a European Hadron Facility, which like the SuperLEAR project went unrealized, as both were in financial competition with larger CERN expansions. However, Helmut Koch was able to continue the spectroscopic investigation of hadrons with the Babar experiment in Stanford, California, and at the ELSA accelerator in Bonn. When the opportunity arose to build another dedicated antiproton machine on European soil, Helmut Koch was fully committed to the project. It is thanks to his contribution that antiproton physics is part of the new FAIR facility in Darmstadt. The “A” in FAIR stands for antiprotons. Unfortunately, the PANDA experiment, which offers new and unique opportunities to study hadrons, is coming too late for him.

Finally, a word about the man and university professor Helmut Koch. He earned his Habilitation in Karlsruhe while working at CERN, and then became a C3 professor in Karlsruhe before accepting a C4 professorship in Bochum in 1990—something he never regretted because he felt very welcome here. Above all, Helmut Koch was a true gentleman and humanist, always friendly and caring, someone who appreciated and supported his students and colleagues. He has always been willing to serve the hadron physics community, be it as a reviewer, conference organizer or DPG section chairman. Even in critical situations, he always remained level-headed and never a bad word came from him. His considerate and gracious demeanor also made him a popular companion on sailing trips, which were one of his favorite pastimes on vacation. Beautiful sailing trips and gourmet dinners followed by a good glass of red wine are also among my personal unforgettable memories of a great person and mentor: Helmut Koch.

Ulrich Wiedner

Successful test-beam time with the PANDA forward endcap calorimeter at the COSY proton-accelerator

Particle detectors are the essential tools for physicists to study the properties and interactions of the smallest building blocks of matter in our universe. A next generation particle physics detector will be the PANDA detector. The PANDA experiment will study one of the fundamental forces of nature, the strong interaction, in reactions where anti-matter and matter annihilate. Antiproton Proton reactions, $\overline{\textrm{p}}\textrm{p}$-reactions, at the future international research facility FAIR located in Darmstadt will for example be used to investigate the complex bound states of the strong interaction and to search for exotic states. The forward endcap of the electromagnetic calorimeter (FWEC) is an essential part of the PANDA detector and is used to measure the energy of electrons, positrons and photons with very good resolution 
How is such a calorimeter set-up and how is it put into operation? 
These questions can be answered by the members of the research groups of Prof. Ulrich Wiedner in Bochum and Prof. Ulrike Thoma in Bonn. Both groups together successfully assembled and tested the FWEC during two test-beam times at the proton accelerator COSY at Forschungszentrum Jülich in the second half of 2023.

Figure 2: Installed support structure
of the FWEC
at COSY

Figure 1: Lifted FWEC
supportstructure at
Ruhr-Universität Bochum

In mid-March, the first step was made transporting the support structure of the FWEC from Bochum to Jülich. Four cranes were needed to move the circularly shaped support-structure with a diameter of 2.5 m and a weight of 350 kg to its interim destination at COSY. In Figure1 and the photo gallery you can see a snapshot of this spectacular event.
After arriving at Forschungszentrum Jülich, it was mounted within a massive transport frame, holding the FWEC in an upright position and preventing it from tilting. Several ground anchors were used to secure it, even in the case of small earth quakes.  In a second step the support structure had to be equipped with the detector modules. Each module consists of 16 or 8 scintillation crystals made of lead tungstate with a photodetector attached.
An incident particle deposits energy within the crystals and the energy is converted into light. This is detected via an attached photodetector that generates an electrical signal, which can be processed with further readout electronics. As the signal output is proportional to the deposited energy, the energy of the incident particle can be reconstructed. 
The design and assembly of the electromagnetic calorimeter is a truly international endeavor. The crystals were tested at the University of Gießen and CERN (Geneva, Switzerland), the photodetectors were tested at the Universities of Bochum and Bonn, as well as at GSI, (Darmstadt), the preamplifiers were designed and produced at the University of Basel (Switzerland), the mechanics were designed at the University of Groningen (Netherlands), the cooling system was designed at Orsay (France), digitization electronics were developed at and provided by the University of Uppsala (Sweden). 
The picture below illustrates assembled modules on the left as well as the single components on the right and printed circuit boards readout boards in the front. The, at the University of Bochum, assembled detector modules were tested and pre-calibrated at the University of Bonn, at their later operation temperature of -25°C to ensure proper functionality.

Figure 3: FWEC detector modules, their components and the electronic board for photodetector-HV-adjustment as well as the patch panel board

The excellent collaboration between Bochum and Bonn, finally payed off in the joint detector mounting in Jülich. In total 60 detector modules with 864 crystals were mounted and equipped with the necessary front-end electronics and cables. As the whole calorimeter must be operated at freezing -25°C, all parts were covered with insulation and a complex cooling system was installed to reach and maintain the targeted temperature. As condensation is a problem when running electronics at such cold temperatures, the FWEC was flushed with dry air and nitrogen. The different stages of the assembly are shown in the figures 4-6. 

Figure 4: FWEC front with 60 mounted
detector modules

Figure 5: FWEC back with printed
circuit boards and cables

Figure 6: FWEC front, covered in
insulation and connected cooling pipes

Remaining tasks were the installation of a detector control system to control the detector with all of its subsystems and the DAQ to read out and store the detector signals. 

In July, the system with its 864 crystal units was finally put into operation for the first time at the proton beam of the COSY accelerator in Jülich. This first test was followed by two beam times in August and September. During these beamtimes high energetic particles, including s and s, were produced at the target in the proton beam. The produced particles or their decay products were then measured with the FWEC.
With these efforts, one of the first detector components of the ANDA detector, the partially equipped FWEC, has started its operation and was carefully tested under beam conditions. Figure 7 shows the FWEC on the right, the proton beam pipe and target in between.

Figure 7: Setup of the FWEC for COSY beam

During the successful beam times 210 TB of data were recorded, which are currently being analyzed. They will be used to calibrate the detector, to study its performance in detail and to improve the software, needed to reconstruct the information on the particles detected in the FWEC. Over 15 years of careful research and hardware developments have led to this exciting moment of observing the first particles in our detector system. 

Figure 8: Energy spectrum showing
minimum ionizing particles obtained
with one crystal unit of the FWEC.

It is known by simulations that minimal ionizing particles deposit an energy of about 200MeV inside one crystal and we could confirm this prediction already at the beginning of our measurements. This energy deposition corresponds to an ADC-value of about 4000 depending on the individual amplification of each readout channel. 
This is shown as an example for one of the crystals in Figure 8. 

The next stop in the journey of the FWEC will be the electron accelerator ELSA in Bonn. First the FWEC will be commissioned with all of its 268 detector modules (3856 crystals) and is then used for hadron physics experiments. At ELSA, photoproduction experiments will be performed using a polarized beam and target and the FWEC as forward calorimeter to study the emergence of complex bound states of the strong interaction made of up, down and strange quarks. 

As soon as the antiproton beam is available at FAIR, the FWEC will finally be moved to Darmstadt to be part of the PANDA-Experiment. With the PANDA-Experiment new insights into strong interaction will be gained. This provides for interesting research especially for future generations of young scientists. 

Theory PhD prize

PANDA awards a prize every two years for the best theory PhD thesis related to the PANDA experimental program. We would like to ask for nominations for the upcoming prize. The prize will include the award of 200 Euro and will be presented at the PANDA Collaboration meeting in June 2024.

 

All theoreticians who have passed the oral defense of their PhD thesis between Jan 1, 2022 and December 31, 2023 are eligible. The thesis may contain work related to other experiments, but the majority of the work in the thesis must be directly connected to the PANDA physics program.
The nomination should be made by the thesis advisor.

 

A nomination can be made until February 29, 2024 by submitting the following information to the spokesperson and the chair of the theory advisory group (Christian Fischer, christian.fischer@physik.uni-giessen.de) of the collaboration:

 

1. A nomination letter in which the content of the thesis and the importance of this work for PANDA is described. The letter should also motivate why the thesis should be considered as the best one from the selection period for PANDA.

2. The thesis must be made available online and the URL must be included in the nomination. If the thesis cannot be uploaded to the PANDA website then a PDF copy should be submitted with the nomination letter.

3. If the thesis is not written in English, then a (couple of pages) summary must be provided in English.

4. A copy of a certificate showing the grade achieved by the thesis if relevant (and a short description of the grade scale). This certificate should indicate the date of the oral exam. If that is not the case, then some other confirmation of when the oral exam was held must be provided (a letter from the thesis advisor will suffice, if a copy of a formal document is submitted before the PANDA Collaboration meeting in June 2024.)

List with all prize winners.

PANDA receives gift from LHCb

CERN’s LHCb experiment has donated its decommissioned outer tracker detector component to PANDA. 

   

PANDA is happy about a gift it has received from LHCb, one of the four big CERN experiments at the Large Hadron Collider. LHCb has sent their decommissioned Outer Tracker (OT) from Geneva to Darmstadt, where it has arrived at GSI (25. August 2023) after a special transport of five days via truck and ship. The LHCb colleagues at CERN prepared the detector in its transport frame with protecting plastic for a journey in three stages, due to the "package" size: Seven meter long, 3.5 meter wide, 5.5 meter high and a weight of 24 tons. The first stage of the journey by truck brought the OT from CERN to the harbour of Colmar where a Rhine ship took over the second stage and delivered the OT to Gernsheim harbour, where a truck did the last stage to GSI. 

The donation from LHCb to PANDA was initiated by by our deputy technical coordinator Anastasios "Tassos" Belias and Niels Tuning from LHCb/CERN after discussions about spare detector modules at a conference a few years ago.
Finally the LHCb collaboration decided to donate the whole OT to the PANDA collaboration, which was then formally signed in a contract between GSI and CERN/LHCb last year.

The donation was made possible thanks to the close cooperation in logistics and technical aspects between several colleagues at CERN and GSI/FAIR, in particular Niels Tuning (LHCb, Nikhef/CERN) and Anastasios Belias (PANDA, GSI/FAIR) and their relentless efforts to give the formidable outer tracker a second life. The donation was kindly agreed upon by the LHCb groups who meticulously built and operated the outer tracker, namely,

  •  the National Institute for Subatomic Physics, Nikhef, the Netherlands,
  •  the Physikalisches Institut der Universität Heidelberg, Germany,
  •  the National Centre for Nuclear Research, Warsaw, Poland,
  •  the Henryk Niewodniczanski Institute of Nuclear Physics, Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow, Poland,
  •  and the Technische Universität Dortmund, Germany.

The OT consists of 54.000 Straw tubes, each 2.4 m long with a diameter of 5 mm, which are arranged in staggered double layers and mounted to twelve C-shaped mechanical frames. The C-frames are inserted in the big blue transport frame (c.f. pictures).  

There are several ideas how individual parts of the OT can be re-used in different experiments and set-ups in the future.
At PANDA the tracker will be able to detect the light hadrons produced by the collisions. Hadron spectroscopy is where the physics goals of LHCb and PANDA overlap, and the two will be able to collect complementary data that can later be analysed and compared. The tracker will also be used by students and young researchers in R&D projects, as well as in outreach activities for schools and the general public.

Outstanding Achievement Award 2022

Once again this year, the outstanding efforts of two groups were recognized by the PANDA Collaboration and awarded the annual prize for their exceptional work for the operation and realization of PANDA at FAIR.


The first award went to Tobias Stockmanns (middle photo on the right) and Anna Alicke (on the right photo) for their development of a realistic and generalized tracking algorithm for the PANDA experiment. Their development of a more generalized algorithm that is agnostic to the point of production is absolutely crucial for the foreseen hyperon physics program of PANDA and an important milestone for the PANDA software. 

The second prize went to Lars Schmitt (middle photo on the left) and Anastasios Belias (on the left) for their tireless work to realize the PANDA detector at FAIR. Their continuous persistence and creativity, which went far beyond what could have been expected, is not only an inspiration for the entire collaboration, but also a guarantee for the realization of our ambitious project eventually. Both are unparalleled in their commitment to the technical side of the project and are like a rock in the current storm

The awards were presented by the Spokesperson Ulrich Wiedner (who took the middle photo) on the occasion of a boat tour during the recent Collaboration Meeting In Prague.
 

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