The experiment PANDA: Physics with antiprotons at FAIR

PANDA is an experiment that will run at the future facility FAIR, Darmstadt, Germany. A high intensity and cooled antiproton beam will collide on a fixed hydrogen or nuclear target covering center-of-mass energies between 2.2 and 5.5 GeV. PANDA addresses various physics aspects from the low energy non-perturbative region towards the perturbative regime of QCD. With the impressive theoretical developments in this field, e.g. lattice QCD, the predictions are becoming more accurate in the course of time. The data harvest with PANDA will, therefore, be an ideal test bench with the aim to provide a deeper understanding of hadronic phenomena such as confinement and the generation of hadron masses. A variety of physics topics will be covered with PANDA, for example: the formation or production of exotic non-qqbar charm meson states connected to the recently observed XYZ spectrum; the study of gluon-rich matter, such as glueballs and hybrids; the spectroscopy of the excited states of strange and charm baryons, their production cross section and their spin correlations; the behaviour of hadrons in nuclear matter; the hypernuclear physics; the electromagnetic proton form factors in the timelike region. The PANDA experiment is designed to achieve the above mentioned physics goals with a setup with the following characteristics: an almost full solid angle acceptance; excellent tracking capabilities with high resolution (1–2 % at 1 GeV/c in the central region); secondary vertex detection with resolution ≈ 100 microns or better; electromagnetic calorimetry for detections of gammas and electrons up to 10 GeV; good particle identification of charge tracks (electrons, muons, pions, kaons, protons); a dedicated interchangeable central apparatus for the hypernuclear physics; detector and data acquisition system capable of working at 20 MHz interaction rate with an intelligent software trigger that can provide maximum flexibility.