Detector hardware

The FAIR Experts Committee for Experiments which is reviewing all TDRs submitted to FAIR is meeting for its 5th session on November 24th. In a plenary session status reports of all experimental pillars are expected giving information on the general schedule, the funding situation and the plans for the submission of TDRs and on the status of the detectors in general. The session is not open to the general public, only to announced members of the collaborations.

The PANDA (anti-Proton ANnihiliation at DArmstadt) experiment will be a multi- purpose apparatus at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) at Darmstadt. Anti-proton induced reactions with 1.5 to 15 GeV/c beam momentum at high luminosities of up to 2·1032/(s·cm2) will be investigated. Exclusive detection of whole events with almost 4π acceptance and high precision are needed for the broad physics program. The focus lies on studying the strong interaction in the charm region, by charmonium, open-charm and baryon spectroscopy, and includes the search for glueballs, hybrids and other exotics, hypernuclear physics, nucleon structure studies as well as in-medium modifications of hadrons.

The future international accelerator facility FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion
Research) will host multiple experiments. A focus will be on experiments with antiprotons. The
PANDA (antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt) experiment will study the strong interaction in
annihilation reactions between an antiproton beam and a stationary gas jet target.
The PANDA detector consists of different sub-detectors for tracking, particle identification and
calorimetry. The Micro-Vertex Detector (MVD) as the innermost part of the tracking system will
facilitate precise tracking and detection of secondary vertices. The MVD will comprise hybrid
silicon pixel sensors and double-sided silicon strip sensors.
The strip part will contain approximately 200,000 channels that need to be read out using a highly
integrated front-end chip. Therefore, a custom-made ASIC is being developed. The self-triggering
PASTA chip (PAnda STrip Asic) will employ the Time-over-Threshold (ToT) technique to digitize
the hit amplitude and utilize time-to-digital converters (TDC) with analog interpolators to provide a
high-precision time stamp of the hit. A custom-made Module Data Concentrator ASIC (MDC) will
multiplex the data of all front-ends of one double-sided strip sensor towards the CERN-developed
GBT chip set (GigaBit Transceiver). The MicroTCA-based MVD Multiplexer Board (MMB) at
the off-detector site will receive and concentrate the data from the GBT links and transfer it to
FPGA-based compute nodes for global event building that combines all sub-detectors.

This paper appears in: IEEE Transactions on Nuclear Science Issue Date: DECEMBER.2014

Volume: 61 Issue: 6

On page(s): 1

Print ISSN: 0018-9499

Online ISSN: 1558-1578

Digital Object Identifier: 10.1109/TNS.2014.2363297

ToPiX v4 is the prototype for the readout of the
silicon pixel sensors for the Micro Vertex Detector of the
PANDA experiment. ToPiX provides position, time and energy
measurement of the incoming particles and is designed for
the triggerless environment foreseen in PANDA. The prototype
includes 640 pixels with a size of 100 um x 100 um,
a 160 MHz time stamp distribution circuit to measure both
particle arrival time and released energy (via ToT technique)
and the full control logic. The ASIC is designed in a 0.13 um
CMOS technology with SEU protection techniques for the
digital parts.

Using Antiprotons for High Precision Studies of Hadrons

Recently, after decades of slow progress, numerous facilities worldwide have observed a large number of new hadronic states, some of them with very unusual properties. This includes clear evidence for the existence of exotic hadronic states, i.e. states that can not be reduced to either a simple meson or baryon description. Despite this great advance, the nature of many of these states remains debated. One potentially decisive approach to determine the nature of some of these states is to perform high precision measurements of their lineshape. Such lineshape measurements will be performed using the high intensity, phase space cooled antiproton beam of the High Energy Storage Ring at FAIR. By exploiting kinematic constraints that are available in both resonance and threshold scans, well over an order of magnitude higher precision results will be obtained compared to other facilities. These measurements will be performed by the PANDA experiment, which is a multipurpose detector for a wide range of final states from antiproton annihilation reactions in the charm quark mass range. In addition to precision measurements of exotic hadronic states, PANDA has a fascinating program ranging from (but not limited to) time-like studies of nucleon structure, spectroscopy of open charm mesons, as well multi-strange and charm baryons, to the in-medium properties of charm mesons and spectroscopy of (double)-Lambda hypernuclei.
This talk will present the physics reach of PANDA and the status for the detector construction.

The new Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) is under
construction at GSI in Darmstadt (Germany), where the PANDA experiment
represents the central part of the hadron physics programme. The
multi-purpose PANDA detector in combination with an intense and high
quality anti-proton beam for creating a gluon-rich environment in
anti-proton-proton collisions allows for coverage of a broad range of
different aspects of QCD. Apart from the facility and the apparatus,
an overview of the rich PANDA physics programme will be given, with
focus on the unique possibilities for performing studies in the field
of exotic hadrons.