Status and charm physics prospects at PANDA

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, 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.