IN-REP-2015-006

This Scrutiny Report comprises the findings of the Scrutiny Group gathered during roughly
the past one and a half years. After a first round of data collection from presentations and
through questionnaires prepared by the Scrutiny Group, an Interim Report was presented to
the collaboration. This preliminary report was followed by a second round of questionnaires
and interviews held with conveners, system coordinators, PANDA officials, and the
management team. Already the first round of the scrutiny process resulted in a set of
recommendations documented in the Interim Report as well as a list of the ten most urgent
action items handed in at the explicit request of the spokesperson, which to some extent
already have been adopted by the collaboration.
Some progress on improving the coordination and internal communication processes is
already visible; in some other areas of the PANDA project we still noticed shortcomings and
we name those openly. While the short time span toward the Interim Report allowed only a
limited view on the physics projects and forced us to put more emphasis on the technical
progress in the detector developments and on other issues of technical character, such as
computing and data taking, the present report also contains an in-depth view on the physics
and recommendations for a possible physics program for the early years of operation.
A still completely open issue in the technical part of the project is the apparent lack of
communication with the accelerator branch of FAIR that is concerned with the HESR. It is
hardly imaginable that the PANDA detector can be constructed and rolled into the HESR
beam without mutual understanding of the conditions at the interaction point, its dimensions
and technical realization. A prototype of the target cross is not available and pr omises for
design and construction are pending. This part of the project urgently needs attention.
In order to condense the many facets of information describing the present status and the
perspectives of the PANDA project, we append a SWOT analysis, summarizing the strengths,
weaknesses, opportunities and threats of the project in a few brief statements.