PANDA Website

The future international accelerator facility FAIR (Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research) will host multiple experiments. A focus will be on experiments with antiprotons. The PANDA (antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt) experiment will study the strong interaction in annihilation reactions between an antiproton beam and a stationary gas jet target. The PANDA detector consists of different sub-detectors for tracking, particle identification and calorimetry. The Micro-Vertex Detector (MVD) as the innermost part of the tracking system will facilitate precise tracking and detection of secondary vertices. The MVD will comprise hybrid silicon pixel sensors and double-sided silicon strip sensors. The strip part will contain approximately 200,000 channels that need to be read out using a highly integrated front-end chip. Therefore, a custom-made ASIC is being developed. The self-triggering PASTA chip (PAnda STrip Asic) will employ the Time-over-Threshold (ToT) technique to digitize the hit amplitude and utilize time-to-digital converters (TDC) with analog interpolators to provide a high-precision time stamp of the hit. A custom-made Module Data Concentrator ASIC (MDC) will multiplex the data of all front-ends of one double-sided strip sensor towards the CERN-developed GBT chip set (GigaBit Transceiver). The MicroTCA-based MVD Multiplexer Board (MMB) at the off-detector site will receive and concentrate the data from the GBT links and transfer it to FPGA-based compute nodes for global event building that combines all sub-detectors.