The PANDA experiment at the new Facility for Anti-proton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) at GSI, Darmstadt, will study fundamental questions of hadron physics and QCD using high intensity cooled anti-proton beams with momenta between 1:5 and 15 GeV/c. Efficient Particle Identification (PID) for a wide momentum range and the full solid angle is required for reconstructing the various physics channels of the PANDA program. Hadronic PID in the barrel region of the detector will be provided by a DIRC (Detector of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) counter. The design is based on the successful BABAR DIRC with important improvements, such as focusing optics and fast photon timing. A detailed detector simulation is performed using Geant. A reconstruction algorithm was developed to quantify the performance of different design options in terms of single photon Cherenkov angle resolution and photon yield. Several geometrical improvements, including different radiator geometries and optics, were tested in particle beams at GSI and CERN. In this contribution simulation and reconstruction, the design options, and performance of the detector prototype will be discussed.

The design of the Barrel DIRC detector for the future PANDA experiment at FAIR contains several important improvements compared to the successful BABAR DIRC, such as focusing and fast timing. To test those improvements as well as other design options a prototype was build and successfully tested in 2012 with particle beams at CERN. The prototype comprises a radiator bar, focusing lens, mirror, and a prism shaped expansion volume made of synthetic fused silica. An array of micro-channel plate photomultiplier tubes measures the location and arrival time of the Cherenkov photons with sub-nanosecond resolution. The development of a fast reconstruction algorithm allowed to tune construction details of the detector setup with test beam data and Monte-Carlo simulations.