Optimization studies and performance simulations for the time-of-flight system of PANDA

Abstract

This thesis is focused on the planning, design, and development of the so-called Barrel-TOF detector system for the PANDA detector. The PANDA experiment, which is currently under construction at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Darmstadt, Germany, addresses fundamental questions in hadron and nuclear physics via interactions of antiprotons with nuclei. The Barrel Time-of-Flight detector (Barrel-TOF) for PANDA, developed at the Stefan Meyer Institute, will be one of the key components in PANDA to ensure a proper sorting of the event data and provide particle identication (PID) for charged particles. The implementation of the barrel-TOF detector in the PANDA software framework is a crucial and challenging task due to the unique trigger-less read-out and the missing start time detector of the Panda experiment. Therefore the thesis covers the design of the PANDA barrel-TOF detector and related software issues. The rst part of the work concentrates on the implementation of the Barrel- TOF in the simulation framework of the experiment called PandaRoot. This allows the detector geometry geometry to be optimized and the capabilities of the planned electronics to be investigated, using Monte-Carlo simulations. In the second phase the performance of the Barrel-TOF for the overall experiment is evaluated and optimized. Therefore software algorithms based on the Barrel- TOF are developed, i.e. for triggering, event sorting, start time reconstruction and particle identication. In the last phase the developed and implemented algorithm as well as the acquired knowledge are used to advance the general PANDA reconstruction chain. Together with our international collaborators a dynamical tracking and event reconstruction algorithm (DYTER), which combines the signal of all sub detector systems of PANDA, will be developed.