FAIR status and the PANDA experiment

Abstract

The international accelerator Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) is the next generation accelerator complex for fundamental and applied research with antiproton and ion beams. FAIR will provide worldwide unique facilities enabling a wide spectrum of unprecedented forefront research in hadron and nuclear physics, in atomic physics and nuclear astrophysics as well as in applied sciences like materials research, plasma physics and radiation biophysics. Key features of FAIR are intense beams of antiprotons and ions up to the heaviest and even exotic nuclei covering an energy range from rest up to 30 GeV/u. We present a brief overview on the current construction status of the FAIR accelerator facilities and the associated research pillars with emphasis on PANDA . PANDA (antiProton Annihilation in Darmstadt), is the central experiment to fully exploit the physics research potential of the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) with intense, phase-space cooled, antiprotons up to 15 GeV/c impinging on a variety of fixed targets. The PANDA detector features two spectrometers, the Target Spectrometer with a SC solenoid magnet of 2 T and the Forward Spectrometer with a 2 Tm dipole magnet. In both spectrometers the PANDA collaboration employs a multitude of modern detector technologies to provide tracking, particle identification, calorimetry and muon identification, arranged hermetically close to 4π around the interaction region with additional detectors for coverage of the forward boosted particles. Focusing on the various PANDA detector systems we present an overview of recent developments, the detector construction progress and conclude with an outline for a phased deployment of PANDA at FAIR.

Glueballs as the Ithaca of meson spectroscopy

“…The combination of these three production methods at lepton machines, together with pp annihilation by the PANDA experiment [101,102,103] or at Glue-X in Jefferson Lab [104], that will allow production and careful study of η-like mesons above 1.9 GeV, irrespective of their components being or not charged as the proton and antiproton can annihilate via the strong force, will facilitate mixing studies such as those in Table 4. A multibeam analysis combining data from different measurements will be essential to eventually separate the pseudoscalar Yang-Mills glueball from other η-like mesons in the 2 GeV energy region.…”

Particle identification with the PANDA Barrel DIRC and the GlueX DIRC

“…PANDA [4,5] is a fixed target pp experiment at HESR, it is one of the key experiments at the FAIR accelerator complex, where many physics studies can be addressed. In general, the pp collisions have the advantage of achieving different physics reactions rather than pp or e + e − collisions, due to vanishing the baryon number and the total charge.…”

“…Together with an excellent energy resolution, down to around 25 keV, this kind of reactions gives a complementary and unique opportunity to conduct hadron and charmonium spectroscopy in that energy range. The PANDA physics program [6,4] covers multiple aspects of Quantum Chromodynamics (QCD):…”

“…A comprehensive summary report on the physics program of the PANDA experiment can be found in Ref. [8,6,4]. To achieve the scientific goals of the PANDA physics program, it is essential to detect and identify final state particles, particularly charged kaons.…”

“…The Muon Range System is positioned downstream of the forward-spectrometer calorimeter to reconstruct muon tracks. Lastly, the PANDA luminosity detector [22] uses elastic scattering of antiprotons on protons to determine the interaction rate by measuring antiprotons deflected at low angles [4] and will be installed downstream at the end of the spectrometer.…”