Simulation and reconstruction of the PANDA barrel DIRC

Hadronic particle identification (PID) in the barrel region of the PANDA experiment at the new Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research in Europe (FAIR) at GSI, Darmstadt, will be provided by a DIRC (Detection of Internally Reflected Cherenkov light) counter. The design goal of the Barrel DIRC is to provide clean separation between pions and kaons with at least three standard deviations for momenta between 0.5 and 3.5 GeV/c and polar angles between 22 and 140 . To achieve this performance and reduce the detector cost, detailed simulations of the different design elements, such as the width of the radiators, the shape of the expansion volume and the type of focusing system, were performed using Geant. Custom reconstruction algorithms were developed to match the detector geometry. We discuss the latest achievements in single photon resolution and photon yield as well as the PID performance for different design options of the Barrel DIRC detector.