TH-PHD-2015-007

The PANDA experiment is one of the key projects at the future FAIR facility, which is currently under construction at GSI Darmstadt. Measurements will be performed with antiprotons using a fixed-target setup. One of the pillars of the PANDA program is hadron spectroscopy, in particular studies related to charmonium spectroscopy. The high number of expected collisions allows new discoveries and more accurate measurements of the properties of already known particles. The luminosity is a measure of how efficiently collision events are produced at particle accelerator facilities. Keeping track of luminosity allows monitoring the performance of the accelerator and thus promptly provides information for beam parameter adjustments to optimize the performance. In addition, precise luminosity data is crucial for absolute cross section measurements.

For the PANDA experiment the luminosity will be extracted by monitoring the scattered antiprotons from the ppbar forward elastic scattering. The dedicated detector system, the Luminosity Detector, is currently under construction. The main part of this work describes in detail the developed reconstruction software and summarizes the simulation studies. The systematic uncertainties of the luminosity determination coming from the extraction method are expected to be below 0.1%.

The largest uncertainty is coming from the model description of the elastic scattering. Depending on which experimental data is used, the systematic uncertainty even of the most accurate model varies between 1 – 10% . The background is the second strongest contribution to the systematic uncertainty. According to simulation studies, the background contribution can be reduced down to the level of 1% .

In a ppbar experiment the non-vector charmonium states can be directly produced. Therefore, the fundamental properties such as mass and width of the non-vector states, e.g. of the singlet state of P wave charmonium h_c(P1) , could be measured more accurately than it is currently done with electron-positron colliders. The possible decay modes of the h_c(P1) remain an open question. So far only few of them could have been observed. This work explores the feasibility of the measurement of h_c(P1) hadronic decay modes by PANDA. To select the signal events in large background environment, a model dependent analysis is proposed. The expected signal efficiency is on the level of The background can be suppressed by a factor 10^6.