PA-JOU-2018-018

The PANDA (anti-Proton ANnihiliation at DArmstadt) experiment will be one
of the four flagship experiments at the new international accelerator complex
FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) in Darmstadt, Germany.
PANDA will address fundamental questions of hadron physics and quantum
chromodynamics using high-intensity cooled antiproton beams with momenta
between 1.5 and 15 GeV/c and a design luminosity of up to 2×10^32 cm−2 s−1.
Excellent particle identification (PID) is crucial to the success
of the PANDA physics program. Hadronic PID in the barrel region of the
target spectrometer will be performed by a fast and compact Cherenkov
counter using the detection of internally reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC)
technology. It is designed to cover the polar angle range from 22° to 140° and
will provide at least 3 standard deviations (s.d.) π/K separation up to
3.5 GeV/c, matching the expected upper limit of the final state kaon
momentum distribution from simulation.
This documents describes the technical design and the expected performance
of the PANDA Barrel DIRC detector. The design is based on the successful
BaBar DIRC with several key improvements.
The performance and system cost were optimized in detailed detector
simulations and validated with full system prototypes using particle
beams at GSI and CERN. The final design meets or exceeds the PID goal of
clean π/K separation with at least 3 s.d. over the entire phase space of charged
kaons in the Barrel DIRC.