The understanding of the QCD in the non perturbative regime, is one of the key issue to have a complete picture of the strong interactions. Recent findings of new and unexpected resonances, with unresolved properties, show that the hadron spectrum is not yet completely understood. This is also underlined by the ongoing discussion on multi-quark states, and on other exotic states with gluonic degrees of freedom. The PANDA experiment, one of the biggest enterprises at the FAIR facility, aims at exploring this field thanks to the gluon rich environment offered by antiproton annihilations. The a general overview of the PANDA physics program will be given in the talk.

One of the physics highlights of the future PANDA experiment is to search for exotic states that have been predicted by theory, and whose properties are governed by the presence of valence gluons. Such exotic states can be formed directly and copiously in proton-antiproton annihilations. The challenge lies in reducing the enormous background yield while preserving a high efficiency for the detection of exotic hadrons. As the detector response of background events is very similar to that of the decay of the exotic states, the use of a conventional triggered readout scheme, where a limited number of subdetectors generates a trigger signal that engages the readout of the complete detector, is ruled out. Therefore, a new type of intelligent readout is being developed, where kinematic constraints are imposed online on reconstructed events. The high 20 MHz interaction rate can lead to overlapping detector response signals, creating so-called pile-up signals. Therefore, a different simulation approach is required, where events are no longer simulated sequentially, but are allowed to produce pile-up signals by letting simulated response signals interact with other signals in the same detector element for a set period of time. This means that the timestamp of each event (or even each hit produced by an event) plays a key role in the process, which is why this type of simulation is referred to as “timebased”. Disentangling these overlapping signals and assigning them to the proper events may prove difficult. For the Electromagnetic Calorimeter, impinging particles create groups of hits in the detector, called clusters. To find the energy of these particles, the information from the hits in each cluster has to be recombined. Ideally, each hit in a cluster should belong to the event that spawned it, but this depends on the efficiency of the disentangling procedure. Some results of tests of the timebased simulation code and a macro for disentangling and recombining hits into clusters will be presented.

In the past years a renewed interest has been raised in hadron spectroscopy at the charm energy range, triggered by the discoveries of new unpredicted states, such as X(3872) and Zc+(3900), at the B factories. Nowadays, the BESIII experiment is accumulating a huge data samples of e+e- collisions with total energy between 2 GeV and 4.6 GeV, with an intensive physics program of heavy and light hadron spectroscopy which has also lead to the discovery to new charmonium-like XYZ states. Nevertheless, the physics scenario is still not completed and new deep insight will come from the study of antiproton-proton collisions at the FAIR facility, where the Panda spectrometer will operate up to 5.5 GeV. Panda will provide complementary and in part uniquely decisive information on a wide range of hadronic properties, due to its exclusive features compared to e+e- machines: the strong coupling of the entrance channel with the gluonic components of the produced hadrons; the availability to access to resonances with all the quantum numbers, including states with spin higher than 2; the possibility to perform energy scan of charmonium and open charm states to precisely determine their widths and line shape. This talk will highlight results from BESIII experiment and the prospects for the future Panda experiment.