The PANDA (anti-Proton ANnihiliation at DArmstadt) experiment will be one of the four flagship experiments at the new international accelerator complex FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany. PANDA will address fundamental questions of hadron physics and quantum chromodynamics using high-intensity cooled antiproton beams with momenta between 1.5 and 15 GeV/c and a design luminosity of up to 2×10^32 cm−2 s−1. Excellent particle identification (PID) is crucial to the success of the PANDA physics program. Hadronic PID in the barrel region of the target spectrometer will be performed by a fast and compact Cherenkov counter using the detection of internally reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC) technology. It is designed to cover the polar angle range from 22° to 140° and will provide at least 3 standard deviations (s.d.) π/K separation up to 3.5 GeV/c, matching the expected upper limit of the final state kaon momentum distribution from simulation. This documents describes the technical design and the expected performance of the PANDA Barrel DIRC detector. The design is based on the successful BaBar DIRC with several key improvements. The performance and system cost were optimized in detailed detector simulations and validated with full system prototypes using particle beams at GSI and CERN. The final design meets or exceeds the PID goal of clean π/K separation with at least 3 s.d. over the entire phase space of charged kaons in the Barrel DIRC.

The design of straw tube detector modules developed for the PANDA Forward Tracker is presented. One module consists of 32 straws with 10mm diameter, arranged in two staggered layers, and has a very low material budget of only 8:8 x10^-4 X0. The overpressure of the working gas mixture of 1 bar makes the module self-supporting and enables the use of lightweight and compact support frames. Detection planes in the Forward Tracker consist of modules mounted closely, without gaps, next to each other on a support frame. A module can be mounted and dismounted from the frame without the need to remove the neighborig modules, enabling fast repairs. Technical details of the detector design and the assembly procedure of the straw tubes and the straw modules as well as results of performed tests of the modules are given.

Nuclear systems with two units of strangeness are still poorly known despite their importance for many strong interaction phenomena. Stored antiprotons beams in the GeV range represent an unparalleled factory for various hyperon-antihyperon pairs. Their outstanding large production probability in antiproton collisions will open the floodgates for a series of new studies of systems which contain two or even more units of strangeness. For the first time, high resolution gamma-spectroscopy of doubly strange nuclei will be performed, thus complementing measurements of ground state decays of double hypernuclei at J-PARC or possible decays of particle unstable hypernuclei in heavy ion reactions. High resolution spectroscopy of multistrange Cascade-atoms are feasible and even the production of Omega-atoms will be within reach. The latter might open the door to the s=3 world in strangeness nuclear physics, by the study of the hadronic Omega-nucleus interaction. For the first time it will be possible to study the behaviour of anti-Cascade in nuclear systems under well controlled conditions.