How much charm can PANDA create?

At the future PANDA experiment at the FAIR facility in Darmstadt, proton-antiproton collisions will be studied at an energy up to ≅5.5 GeV, which suffices to produce charmed hadron pairs like D anti D or Λc anti Λc. Their yet unknown production cross sections are of special interest for flavour physics, since they could provide higher statistics for the investigation of charmed hadrons, if large enough. Importantly they also give the opportunity to study fundamental interaction dynamics of hadrons and its connection to QCD. It is a difficult task to predict these cross sections, since the energy here is still slightly above the production threshold and so not easily accessible to perturbative QCD. We describe the process by a model based on the effective exchange of intermediating hadrons according to Regge theory. An important ingredient are process-dependent coupling constants between certain hadrons, which we calculate using the method of QCD light-cone sum rules. Making use of the Regge model we give an improved estimate of the cross sections for exclusive open charm production at PANDA energies.