Status and Perspectives of PANDA

Abstract

Physics with antiprotons in the charmonium mass region will play a major role at the future PANDA experiment at the FAIR facility in Darmstadt. At PANDA, an antiproton beam with momenta up to 15 GeV/c circulating in the high-energy storage ring HESR will interact with a hydrogen target. High interaction rates and unprecedented momentum precision will allow experiments addressing, among a variety of other physics goals, hidden and open charm spectroscopy. The detector system of PANDA is optimized to meet the challenges of high-resolution spectroscopy of charmonium states of any quantum number in formation and production with very good background suppression. At the same time, emphasis is placed on meeting the requirements of other parts of the physics program as, e.g. spectroscopy of hypernuclei, with a flexible setup of detector components. This contribution discusses the layout of the PANDA detector. Apart from a description of the overall layout of the experiment, several novel detector developments will be described.