The PANDA experiment (antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt) is one of the four key experiments to be operated at FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research), which is currently under construction near Darmstadt/Germany. This fixed target experiment will address a wide range of open questions in the field of hadron physics. The detector consists of at target as well as a forward spectrometer to fully exploit the forward boosted collisions of antiprotons with dense hydrogen or nuclear targets. Phase-space cooled antiprotons with momenta in the range of 1.5 GeV/c to 15 GeV/c provided by the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) allow for high precision line-shape scans. The ability to perform exclusive reconstruction of arbitrary final states enables a physics program including topics such as spectroscopy in the charmonium and open-charm region, proton structure, and hyperon and hypernuclear physics. The talk will give an overview of the PANDA experiment and highlight the most important aspects of the physics program.

The P̄ANDA experiment represents the central part of the hadron physics program at the FAIR facility that is under construction at GSI in Darmstadt. In the early stages of the experiment, during the commissioning phase, a proton beam instead of an antiproton beam will be provided by the accelerator and the reduced Day-1 setup will be available. One of the first experiments that could be performed already during the commissioning phase are cross section measurements of π 0 and η production in proton proton reactions. The reconstruction efficiency for photons, π⁰, η and protons of the Day-1 setup has been studied using PandaRoot simulations. In addition the full meson production chain including baryonic resonances has been simulated and efficiencies for complete final state reconstruction have been determined. There are some losses due to the incomplete Day-1 setup but the relevant phase space for those reactions is covered sufficiently well. P̄ANDA will be able to contribute to the measurement of total as well as differential meson production cross sections with high precision. Moreover a first study on the channel p̄p → φφπ⁰ has been performed. P̄ANDA could play an important role in confirming the existence of the predicted 2 ++ glueball resonance in φφ and measure its properties.

High event rates of up to 20 MHz and continuous detector readout makes the event filtering at PANDA a challenging task. In addition, no hardware-based event selection will be possible due to the similarities between signal and background. This makes PANDA among a new generation of experiments utilizing a fully software-based event filtering. Classically, detector hits are pre-sorted into events by the hardware filter before being passed to the software-based event filter with track reconstruction and event building. Track reconstruction will play a key part in the online filtering at PANDA where it will be used iteratively together with the event building. To ensure the quality of the track reconstruction, the existing quality assurance task has been modified to be able to cope with free streaming data. This talk will address the data stream at PANDA as well as the candidates for online track reconstruction algorithms for free streaming data based e.g. on the Cellular Automaton. The quality assurance procedure and the results from the tracking at different event rates and level of event mixing is presented.