Physics analysis

The antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt (PANDA) experiment is one of the four key experiments to be operated at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR), 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. This paper will give an overview of the PANDA experiment and highlight some of the important aspects of the physics program.

PANDA Management Quarterly Report 20Q4

PANDA Collaboration Meeting 20/3 Minutes

PANDA Management Quarterly Report 20Q3

Binary hyperon production in antiproton-proton annihilations will be carried out with the PANDA experiment at FAIR, and probes the strong interaction in the non-perturbative regime where the relevant degrees of freedom are unclear. The self-analyzing decays of hyperons provide a straightforward way to study reaction dynamics via the measurement of spin observables. However, since weakly decaying hyperons can travel several centimeters before decaying, they are challenging to reconstruct. Conventional track reconstruction algorithms assume that charge particles originate in the experiment interaction point.

In this thesis, software tools are developed for the reconstruction and fitting of charged particles in the collaboration-wide software package PandaRoot. Pattern recognition algorithms are developed for the reconstruction of charged particle tracks with displaced vertices. Three algorithms that reconstruct the longitudinal momentum in the Straw Tube Tracker (STT) of PANDA are developed. They are based on a combinatorial approach, a Hough Transform, and a recursive annealing fit. The implementation and performance of these algorithms are presented. The track fitting scheme of PandaRoot is overhauled to treat the five particle species that PANDA is expected to measure, namely electrons, muons, pions, kaons and protons. The new track fitting scheme is outlined and discussed.

When the PANDA experiment is taken into operation, beam time will be allocated to many different measurements. For this reason, feasibility studies are performed in this thesis. The pbar p -> Lambdabar Lambda reaction is simulated at 1.642 GeV/c and the pbar p -> Xibar+ Xi- reaction is simulated at 7.0 and 4.6 GeV/c beam momenta. The simulation and analysis chain of the studies are explained. Expected reconstruction rates are presented. Furthermore, the feasibility of reconstructing spin observables in the reactions is discussed.

PANDA Management Quarterly Report 20Q1Q2