Microchannel-plate (MCP) PMTs were identified as the only suitable photon sensors for the two DIRC detectors of the PANDA experiment at FAIR. As the long-standing aging problem of MCP-PMTs was recently overcome by coating the MCP pores with an atomic layer deposition (ALD) technique, further improved 2-inch MCP-PMTs were investigated. The best PHOTONIS device has reached a lifetime of >20 C/cm2 integrated anode charge without any sign of aging. Also the newly developed 2-inch MCP-PMTs of Hamamatsu are maturing and are usable in high rate environments. The status of our long-term lifetime measurements and the performance parameters of the currently most advanced ALD-coated MCP-PMTs from PHOTONIS and Hamamatsu are presented. In addition, first results obtained with a new quality assurance setup for MCP-PMTs are discussed. This setup consists of a high performance DAQ system to measure the response of >=64 anode pixels simultaneously. The system allows to study and quantify background parameters like position dependent dark count rates and ion afterpulsing as well as temporal and spacial distributions of recoil electrons and the effects of electronic and charge-sharing crosstalk among the anode pixels.

The Endcap Disc DIRC has been developed to provide an excellent particle identification for the future PANDA experiment by separating pions and kaons up to a momentum of 4 GeV/c with a separation power of 3 standard deviations in the polar angle region from 5 ◦ to 22 ◦ . This goal will be achieved using dedicated particle identification algorithms based on likelihood methods and will be applied in an offline analysis and online event filtering. This paper evaluates the resulting PID performance using Monte-Carlo simulations to study basic single track PID as well as the analysis of complex physics channels. The online reconstruction algorithm has been tested with a Virtex4 FGPA card and optimized regarding the resulting constraints.

The PANDA detector at the future FAIR facility at GSI is planned as a fixed- target experiment for proton-antiproton collisions at momenta between 1.5 and 15 GeV/c. It will be used to address open questions in hadronic physics. In order to achieve a sufficient particle identification, two different DIRC detector concepts have been developed. This talk will cover the Endcap Disc DIRC detector which is placed at the forward endcap of the PANDA target spectrometer and will provide a 3σ separation of pions and kaons up to a momentum of 4 GeV/c for polar angles from 5° to 22°. The most important component of the DIRC detector is a 2 cm thin fused silica radiator plate that is divided into 4 identical quadrants. The surfaces are polished with high precision in order to guarantee little photon losses by total reflection and conserve the Cherenkov angle during propagation through the optical system. Intrinsic chromatic errors will be minimized by the implementation of an optical filter. The readout system consists of 96 readout elements with focusing optics and attached MCP-PMTs to focus the photons that are produced by the Cherenkov cone of the traversing particle and acquire their position and timing information. This new detector concept requires the development of dedicated reconstruction and particle identification algorithms which permit an efficient analysis of the measured time-correlated photon patterns. Time and event based simulations with dedicated Monte-Carlo simulation frameworks have been used to validate the PID requirements of the DIRC counter. Additionally, the Monte-Carlo simulations have been used to estimate the radiation dose in different detector volumes in order to compare these values with actual measurement results.