PA-PRO-2018-006

The PANDA experiment at the international accelerator Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in
Europe (FAIR) near GSI, Darmstadt, Germany will address fundamental questions of hadron physics.
Excellent Particle Identification (PID) over a large range of solid angles and particle momenta will be essential
to meet the objectives of the rich physics program. Charged PID for the barrel region of the PANDA target
spectrometer will be provided by a DIRC (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) detector.
The Barrel DIRC will cover the polar angle range of 22-140deg and cleanly separate charged pions from
kaons for momenta between 0.5 GeV/c and 3.5 GeV/c with a separation power of at least 3 standard
deviations. The design is based on the successful BABAR DIRC and the SuperB FDIRC R&D with several
important improvements to optimize the performance for PANDA, such as a focusing lens system, fast
timing, a compact fused silica prism as expansion region, and lifetime-enhanced Microchannel-Plate PMTs
for photon detection.
This article describes the technical design of the PANDA Barrel DIRC and the result of the design
validation using a \vertical slice" prototype in hadronic particle beams at the CERN PS.