The PANDA Barrel-TOF Detector at FAIR

The barrel-Time-of-Flight subdetector is one of the outer layers of the multi-layer design of the PANDA target spectrometer. It is designed with a minimal material budget in mind mainly consisting of 90x 30 x 5mm(3) thin plastic scintillator tiles read out on each end by a serial connection of 4 SiPMs. 120 such tiles are placed on 16 2460 x 180mm(2) PCB boards forming a barrel covering an azimuthal angle from 22.5 degrees to 150 degrees. The detector is designed to achieve a time resolution below sigma < 100 ps which allows to distinguish events in the constant stream of hits, as well as particle identification below the Cherenkov threshold via the time-of-flight; simultaneously providing the interaction times of events. The current prototype achieved a time resolution of similar to 54 ps, well below the design goal.