Hyperon spectroscopy and dynamics with PANDA at FAIR

One of the most challenging questions in contemporary physics is how and why the strong interaction confines the quarks into composite hadrons; either mesons (quark-antiquark) or baryons (three quarks).

Hyperons are baryons where one (or several) light quark(s) are replaced by a heavier one(s). Strange hyperon spectroscopy and dynamics can provide keys to the strong interaction in the so far poorly understood confinement domain. Ever since first observed in experiment, hyperons have played an important role in our understanding of fundamental interactions. In the early days of particle physics, the newly discovered ground-state hyperons provided a key to the eight-fold way of the strong interaction from which the quark model emerged. In the same way, the excited hyperon hyperon spectra could take our understanding to a new level.
Furthermore, the scale of strange hyperon production is governed by the mass of the strange quark, i.e. ~100 MeV. This coincides with the scale of the confinement domain which makes hyperon production an excellent probe of the strong interaction in this region.
The foreseen PANDA experiment at FAIR will be a strangeness factory which provides a unique opportunity to gain insight into the strong interaction. In this talk, I will ouline the hyperon physics programme for the first years of operation with PANDA.