PANDA Website

The PANDA experiment at the international accelerator Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) near GSI, Darmstadt, Germany will address fundamental questions of hadron physics. Excellent particle identification is required to achieve the PANDA physics goals. Hadronic particle identification (PID) in the PANDA target spectrometer will be delivered by two DIRC (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) counters. The Barrel DIRC will cover the polar angle range of 22−140 degree and is designed to provide pion/kaon separation for momenta between 0.5 GeV/c and 3.5 GeV/c with a separation power of at least 3 standard deviations. Several reconstruction algorithms have been developed to determine the performance of the detector. The "geometrical reconstruction" determines the Cherenkov angle relying primarily on the position of the detected photons. The "time imaging", however, utilizes both position and time measurements by directly performing the maximum likelihood fit. GEANT4 simulations and experimental data from prototype tests at the CERN PS were used to optimize the performance of the algorithms. We will discuss detailed aspects of both reconstruction approaches.