PA-PRO-2014-018

Hadronic particle identification (PID) in the barrel region of the PANDA experiment at the new Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) at GSI, Darmstadt will be provided by a DIRC (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) counter. To optimize the performance and reduce the detector cost, detailed simulations of different design elements, such as the width of the radiators, the shape of the expansion volume, and the type of focusing system, were performed using Geant. Custom reconstruction algorithms were developed to match the detector geometry. We will discuss the single photon resolution and photon yield as well as the PID performance for the Barrel DIRC baseline design and several detector design options.