Development of the PANDA barrel DIRC

Cooled antiproton beams of unprecedented intensities of L = 2 x 1032 s-1cm-2 in the momentum range of 1.5-15 GeV/c will be used for the PANDA experiment at FAIR to perform high precision experiments in the charmed quark sector. The major physical research topics will be: Spectroscopy of resonances in the energy region of charmonium and above the D-bar D threshold, in-medium effects of open and hidden charm, glueballs, and single and double hypernuclei. The proposed PANDA detector is a 4π spectrometer working with a fixed target in the internal beam of the HESR. It will allow the detection and identification of neutral and charged particles generated within the total energy range of the antiproton annihilation products. The charged particle identification at polar angles from 22 deg. to 140 deg. will be performed with a detector barrel working with the Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light (DIRC).