TH-PHD-2013-004

PANDA is one of the experiments which will be installed at the FAIR facility in Darmstadt. It will study the collisions of an antiproton beam with different fixed targets. The main focus of the experiment will be on strong interactions at the energy regime corresponding to the charm quark region. Charmonium states, open-charm mesons and charmed baryons will be studied with a high precision experiment. The tracking detectors will play an important role allowing for a precise reconstruction of particles momenta and decay vertices. In particular, in the case of short-lived particles, the contribution of the Micro-Vertex-Detector (MVD), which is the innermost tracker of the experiment, will be crucial. Detailed Monte-Carlo studies based on an implementation of the detector geometry will be presented analyzing the coverage and vertex reconstruction performance of the MVD in different physics scenarios compatible with the PANDA operational modes. Experimental results obtained with MVD prototype sensors at different particle accelerators will be shown comparing the observations with predictions from Monte-Carlo simulations of the setups. An analysis of the potential reconstruction performance of the PANDA experiment for the pp → Λc Λc reaction will be presented together with a study of the signal to background significance for the selected decay pattern.