TH-PHD-2016-001

The PANDA experiment will be one of the flagship experiments at the future Facility
for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany. It is a versatile
detector dedicated to topics in hadron physics, such as charmonium spectroscopy
and nucleon structure. A DIRC counter will deliver hadronic particle identification
in the barrel part of the PANDA target spectrometer and will cleanly separate kaons
with momenta up to 3.5 GeV/c from a large pion background. An alternative DIRC
design option, using wide Cherenkov radiator plates instead of narrow bars, would
significantly reduce the cost of the system. Compact fused silica photon prisms have
many advantages over the traditional stand-off boxes filled with liquid. This work
describes the study of these design options, which are important advancements of
the DIRC technology in terms of cost and performance. Several new reconstruction
methods were developed and will be presented. Prototypes of the DIRC components
have been built and tested in particle beam, and the new concepts and approaches
were applied. An evaluation of the performance of the designs, feasibility studies
with simulations, and a comparison of simulation and prototype tests will be
presented.