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.

The PANDA experiment is a fixed target experiment where antiprotons collide with stationary hydrogen atoms. The main physics program of the experiment is to study open questions in hadron physics by performing charmonium spectroscopy by precise measurements of width, mass and decay branches and investigating possible exotic states like glueballs and hybrids. The Barrel Time-of-Flight detector (Barrel TOF), which is built in the PANDA target spectrometer, located between the DIRC detector and the EMC, has been designed to precisely measure the time at which a charged particle transits the detector with a resolution superior to the other sub-detectors of PANDA. A time resolution below 100 ps (sigma) is mandatory for this sub-detector to fulfill the requirements of good event separation and particle identification below the Cherenkov threshold. The implementation of the Barrel TOF is based on very fast organic scintillator tiles with a size of 87x29.5x5 mm3 coupled to Silicon Photomultipliers. The total of 1920 tiles are read out each by 8 SiPMs and cover almost the full azimuthal angular range and polar angles from 22.5 deg to 140 deg and an area of about 5 m2. The current prototypes achieve ~60 ps, well below the design goal. The detector R&D is now in a matured stage.