PANDA Website

PANDA is a planned experiment at FAIR (Darmstadt, Germany) with a cooled antiproton beam in a range [1.5; 15] GeV/c, allowing a wide physics program in nuclear and particle physics. It is the only experiment worldwide, which combines a solenoid field (B=2T) and a dipole field (B=2Tm) in an experiment with a fixed target topology, in that energy regime. The tracking system of \panda involves the presence of a high performance silicon vertex detector, a GEM detector, a Straw-Tubes central tracker, a forward tracking system, and a luminosity monitor. The offline tracking algorithm is developed within the PandaRoot framework, which is a part of the FAIRRoot project. The algorithm here presented is based on a tool containing the Kalman Filter equations and a deterministic annealing filter ($genfit2$). $genfit2$ offers to users also a Runge-Kutta track representation, and interfaces with Millepede II (useful for alignment) and RAVE (vertex finder). The Kalman-Filter-based algorithms have a wide range of applications; among those in particle physics they can perform extrapolations of track parameters and covariance matrices. The impact on physics simulations performed for the \panda experiment is showed for the first time, with the PandaRoot framework: improvement is shown for those channels where a good low momentum tracking is required ($p_T$ <350 MeV/c) of about a factor 2.