A focussing disc DIRC for the PANDA experiment

The PANDA experiment at the planned facility for anti-proton and ion research (FAIR) aims at studying the strong interaction by precision spectroscopy, hunting for exotic hadronic states, hard exclusive processes and measuring Drell-Yan pairs. A detector system with excellent particle identification properties covering the full angular and momentum range is therefore mandatory. Polar angles from 5deg to 25deg will be covered by a novel detector in disc geometry using the DIRC principle. The conceptual design of this device includes dispersion correction and focussing optics. Studies are carried out on the radiation hardness of fused silica as candidate radiator material. MCP-PMTs were tested as a likely photon detector candidate. Both studies show that promising candidates for the final detector are already identified.