The PANDA experiment at the future Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) at GSI, Darmstadt, aims at studying the strong interacting matter by precision spectroscopy. A detector system with excellent particle identification over a large range of solid angle and momentum is therefore mandatory. Charged hadron identification in the barrel region will be performed by a compact ring imaging Cherenkov detector based on the DIRC principle (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light), designed to separate pions from kaons with at least 3 standard deviations in the momentum range from 0.5 GeV/c to 3.5 GeV/c. We present details of the simulation of the PANDA Barrel DIRC and a study of the detector performance using a fast reconstruction algorithm to determine the single photon Cherenkov angle resolution and photon yield for several design options.

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.