TA-CON-2018-037

The PANDA experiment at the international FAIR laboratory, currently under construction to expand GSI near Darmstadt, Germany, will investigate fundamental questions of hadron physics in the charm quark energy range. Antiprotons in the 1.5-15 GeV/c momentum range will interact with gas jet or pellet fixed targets. Charged PID for the PANDA target spectrometer will be provided by two DIRC (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) detectors. The Endcap Disc DIRC which covers the PANDA forward endcap solid angle range from 5 to 22 degrees polar angle shall positively identify charged kaons and allow kaon-pion separation from 1 up to 4 GeV/c with a separation power of at least 3 standard deviations. The design including highly polished synthetic fused silica, lifetime-enhanced microchannel plate PMTs and fast readout electronics is presented, also the simulation performance of said final detector. Results of the prototype which include the recently introduced TOFPET-ASIC based read-out, and operated in a test beam at DESY in 2016 are shown and compared to Monte Carlo simulations.