The micro-vertex-detector of the PANDA experiment at Darmstadt

Abstract

The “AntiProton ANnihilations at DArmstadt”—experiment, short PANDA, is one of the main experiments of the “Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research” (FAIR) which replaces and extends the existing GSI-facility at Darmstadt. The main physics goals at the beginning of the experiment in 2012 will be precision spectroscopy of charmonium states, an establishment of gluonic excitations, the search for modifications of meson properties in the nuclear medium and precision γ -ray spectroscopy of single and double hypernuclei. For many of these physics goals an identification of D-mesons via the detection of a secondary vertex with a decay length in the order of 100 μ m is essential. Therefore, a special micro-vertex-detector (MVD) is foreseen which allows a precise tracking of all charged particles. Several different technology options from monolithic active pixels to hybrid pixel detectors are on the market. Unfortunately, none of these techniques fully meets the requirements of the PANDA experiment. Different technologies are compared with respect to the requirements of PANDA. In addition, a possible design of the MVD will be shown, which features a combination of hybrid pixel modules, whose layout might be adopted from ATLAS or other LHC experiments, for the inner layers and silicon strip detectors for the outer layers.