Paper

A new generation of experiments is being developed, where the challenge of separating rare signal processes from background at high intensities requires a change
of trigger paradigm. At the future PANDA experiment at FAIR, hardware triggers will be abandoned and instead a purely software-based system will be used.
This requires novel reconstruction methods with the ability to process data from
many events simultaneously.
A 4D tracking algorithm based on the cellular automaton has been developed which will utilize the timing information from detector signals. Simulation studies
have been performed to test its performance on the foreseen free-streaming data from the PANDA detector. For this purpose, a quality assurance procedure for
tracking on free-streaming data was implemented in the PANDA software. The studies show that at higher interaction rates, 4D tracking performs better than
the 3D algorithm in terms of efficiency, 84% compared to 77%. The fake track suppression is also greatly improved, compared to the 3D tracking with roughly
a 50% decrease in the ghost rate.

Dear colleagues,
attached the proceedings write-up of my talk at ICNFP200, TA-CON-2020-027, in Aug.2020, in Crete.
All feedback welcome by 31-Mar-2021.
Many thanks!!
Best wishes, Tassos

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.

The antiproton experiment PANDA at FAIR is designed to take hadron physics to a new level
in scope, precision and accuracy. In this work, its unique capability for studies of hyperons is outlined. We
discuss hyperons as diagnostic tool to study non-perturbative aspects of the strong interaction, and fundamental
symmetries. New simulation studies have been carried out for two benchmark hyperon-antihyperon
production channels. The results, presented in detail in this paper, show that hyperon-antihyperon pairs
can be exclusively reconstructed with high efficiency and very low background contamination. In addition,
the polarisation and spin correlations have been studied, exploiting the self-analysing decay of hyperons
and antihyperons. Two independent approaches to the finite efficiency have been applied and evaluated:
one standard multidimensional efficiency correction approach, and one efficiency independent approach.
The applicability of the latter was thoroughly evaluated for all channels, beam momenta and observables.
The standard method yields good results in all cases, and show that spin observables can be studied with
high precision and accuracy already during the first phase of data taking with PANDA.

The PANDA experiment will use cooled antiproton beams with high intensity stored
in the High Energy Storage Ring at FAIR. Reactions on a fixed target will shed light on
the strong QCD with charmed hadrons.
Ring imaging Cherenkov counters are used for charged particle identification.
The status of the Barrel DIRC (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) is described.
Its design is robust and its performance validated in experiments with test beams.
The PANDA Barrel DIRC has entered the construction phase and will be installed in 2023/2024.

The PANDA experiment is one of the pillars of the new Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research, currently under construction in Darmstadt, Germany. PANDA will be a fixed-target experiment which will study non-perturbative strong interaction phenomena in antiproton-proton collisions in the beam momentum range of 1.5 - 15 GeV/c. Strangeness production will be addressed through pbar p -> Hyperon-Antihyperon processes. The results of a feasibility study to measure the pbar p ->Sigmabar Lambda reaction, at antiproton beam momenta of 1.771 GeV/c and 6 GeV/c are presented and discussed in this paper.

Due to a high antiproton beam resolution the PANDA experiment at FAIR will offer a unique possibility to perform precise resonance energy scans. Thereby a precise line shape and width measurement of very narrow resonances like the charmonium-like X(3872), which is discussed to be exotic, becomes feasible. Monte Carlo studies have been performed, to address the achievable sensitivities of such measurements, assuming different signal cross-sections, line shapes and luminosity combinations.

Hyperons provide new angles on two of the most challenging problems in con-
temporary physics: a coherent and quantitative description of the strong in-
teraction, and the matter-antimatter asymmetry of the Universe. The produc-
tion dynamics and the electromagnetic structure of strange hyperons, as well
as hyperon spectroscopy, give insights into the strong interaction in the con-
finement domain. Furthermore, two-body decays of strange hyperons provide
clean tests of CP symmetry which provide pieces to the matter-antimatter puz-
zle. The future antiproton experiment PANDA at FAIR offers unique possibilities to study different aspects of hyperons. In particular, the hitherto almost
unexplored multi-strange sector will be addressed. The expected large production cross sections of hyperons and the versatile, near 4π
detector design makesPANDA a veritable hyperon factory already from the first phase of operation.
In these proceedings, the opportunities for hyperon physics with PANDA will be outlined. I will also address how different hyperon physics topics can benefit
from the weak hyperon decays, that provide straight-forward access to the full
spin density matrix.

Channel configuration registers of a full size prototype for the custom readout circuit of silicon
double-sided microstrips of PANDA Micro Vertex Detector were tested for upset effects. The
ASIC is developed with a commercial 110 nm CMOS technology and implements both the Triple
Modular Redundancy and the Hamming Encoding techniques. Results from tests with ion and
proton beams show the robustness level of these two techniques against the upset effects and allow
the evaluation of that commercial 110 nm technology in the PANDA experiment.