Welcome to the PANDA Experiment Website

The PANDA Experiment will be one of the key experiments at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) which is under construction and currently being built on the area of the GSI Helmholtzzentrum für Schwerionenforschung in Darmstadt, Germany. The central part of FAIR is a synchrotron complex providing intense pulsed ion beams (from p to U). Antiprotons produced by a primary proton beam will then be filled into the High Energy Storage Ring (HESR) which collide with the fixed target inside the PANDA Detector.

The PANDA Collaboration with more than 420 scientist from 18 countries intends to do basic physics research on various topics around the weak and strong forces, exotic states of matter and the structure of hadrons. In order to gather all the necessary information from the antiproton-proton collisions a versatile detector will be build being able to provide precise trajectory reconstruction, energy and momentum measurements and very efficient identification of charged particles

Currently the collaboration with Russian Institutes is suspended. For details see statement from GSI.

Outstanding Achievement Award 2022

Once again this year, the outstanding efforts of two groups were recognized by the PANDA Collaboration and awarded the annual prize for their exceptional work for the operation and realization of PANDA at FAIR.


The first award went to Tobias Stockmanns (middle photo on the right) and Anna Alicke (on the right photo) for their development of a realistic and generalized tracking algorithm for the PANDA experiment. Their development of a more generalized algorithm that is agnostic to the point of production is absolutely crucial for the foreseen hyperon physics program of PANDA and an important milestone for the PANDA software. 

The second prize went to Lars Schmitt (middle photo on the left) and Anastasios Belias (on the left) for their tireless work to realize the PANDA detector at FAIR. Their continuous persistence and creativity, which went far beyond what could have been expected, is not only an inspiration for the entire collaboration, but also a guarantee for the realization of our ambitious project eventually. Both are unparalleled in their commitment to the technical side of the project and are like a rock in the current storm

The awards were presented by the Spokesperson Ulrich Wiedner (who took the middle photo) on the occasion of a boat tour during the recent Collaboration Meeting In Prague.
 

PhD prize 2023 call for proposals

Every year, PANDA awards a prize for the best PhD thesis in PANDA of the last year and we’d like to ask again for nominations for this year's prize. The rules are simple as usual:

Who is eligible? And how can nominations be made?

Members of PANDA who have had the oral defense of their PhD thesis during the year preceding the selection are eligible. The thesis may contain work related to other topics/experiments, but the majority of the work in the thesis must be directly connected to PANDA. The thesis advisor can nominate someone who successfully passed the oral defense during the period from June 1, 2022 to May 31, 2023.

A nomination can be made until August 31, 2023 (almost 2 months from now!!) by submitting the following information to the speaker of the collaboration:

1. A nomination letter in which the content of the thesis and the importance of this work for PANDA is described. This should also motivate why that thesis should be considered as the best one of the selection period from PANDA.

2. The thesis must be made available online on the PANDA webpage, and the URL must be included in the nomination. If it is not allowed to upload the thesis to the PANDA website, then a hard copy of the thesis must be submitted.

3. If the thesis is not written in English, then a (couple page) summary must be provided in English.

4. A copy of a certificate showing the grade achieved by the thesis (and a short description of the grade scale). This certificate should indicate the date of the oral exam. If that is not the case, then some other confirmation of when the oral exam was held must be provided (a letter for the thesis advisor will suffice, if a copy of a formal document is delivered before the September meeting.)

The nomination must be made in writing/email. The PANDA Award Committee will propose a PhD Prize Committee as soon as all nominations are in. 

Please keep in mind that potential awardees for the PhD Prize need to be present at the GSI Meeting in October for their PhD presentation. Please consider registration and (if necessary) visa application in time for them.

Announcement Spokesperson election 2023

In spring 2023 the PANDA collaboration elected a new spokesperson and deputy - both started their two year term on July 1st.
Following the experiments "Governance Rules" the collaboration members with voting rights voted for Klaus Peters (CV) to become the new spokesperson and Miriam Fritsch (CV) to be the new deputy.
 
We thank the former team Ulrich Wiedner and Karin Schönning for their work in rough times and wish the new team to have a good hand for the future challenges of PANDA.  

PANDA PhD Prize 2022

Dr. Jenny Regina (Photo: JR/private) has received the PANDA PhD Prize 2022 for her doctoral thesis "Time for Hyperons. Development of Software Tools for Reconstructing Hyperons at PANDA and HADES" at  Uppsala University. Her doctoral advisor was Prof. Dr. Karin Schönning. The award was announced by the spokesman of the PANDA Collaboration, Ulrich Wiedner from the Ruhr-University Bochum, at the most recent PANDA Collaboration meeting at GSI.
The PANDA Collaboration has awarded the PhD Prize once per year since 2013 in order to honor the best dissertation written in connection with the PANDA Experiment. In her dissertation, Physicist Jenny Regina presented a detailed simulation study of hyperons in the PANDA detector, developments of time-based track reconstruction algorithms for PANDA and a library for kinematic fitting in the HADES experiment. A candidate for online track reconstruction algorithms on free streaming data based on a 4D Cellular Automaton has been developed and is benchmarked. It utilizes information from the PANDA straw tube tracker and is agnostic to the point of origin of the particle. The track reconstruction quality assurance procedure and results from the tracking at different event rates have also been presented. Finally, extrapolation algorithms for including hit information from additional detectors in the tracks are outlined. In order to maximize the potential of the predecessor experiment PANDA@HADES, a kinematic fitting procedure has been developed for HADES that combines geometric the decay vertex information of neutral particles and track parameters such as momentum. Journal publications are prepared for each part and Dr. Regina has presented her work at several national and international conferences, as well as in plenary sessions at the PANDA collaboration meeting.
The PANDA Collaboration awards the PhD Prize to specifically honor students’ contributions to the PANDA project. Candidates for the PhD Prize are nominated by their doctoral advisors. In addition to being directly related to the PANDA Experiment, the nominees’ doctoral degrees must have received a rating of “very good” or better. Up to three candidates are shortlisted for the award and can present their dissertations at the PANDA Collaboration meeting. The winner is chosen by a committee that is appointed for this task by the PANDA collaboration.

 

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