PA-PRO-2015-007

The barrel time-of-flight detector for the PANDA experiment at FAIR is foreseen as a Scintillator Tile (SciTil) Hodoscope based on several thousand small plastic scintillator tiles read-out with directly attached Silicon Photomultipliers (SiPMs). The main tasks of the system are an accurate determination of the time origin of particle tracks to avoid event mixing at high collission rates, relative time-of-flight measurements as well as particle identification in the low momentum regime. The main requirements are a minimum use of material and a time resolution of $\sigma < 100\,\mathrm{ps}$. We have performed extensive optimization studies and prototype tests to prove the feasibility of the SciTil design and finalize the R\&D phase. In a 2.7\,GeV/c proton beam at Forschungszentrum J\"ulich a time resolution of about 80\,ps has been achieved using SiPMs from KETEK and Hamamatsu with an active area of $3\times3\,\mathrm{mm^2}$. Employing the Digital Photon Counter from Philips a time resolution of about 30\,ps has been reached.