Performance Monitoring of the Barrel Time-of-Flight Supermodule for the PANDA Experiment at FAIR

The PANDA experiment at FAIR in Darmstadt will use proton-antiproton collisions, with momenta ranging from 1.5 GeV/c to 15 GeV/c, on a fixed target to study open questions in hadron physics. The Barrel Time-of-Flight detector for this experiment is a scintillating tile hodoscope based on 16 identical and independent subdetectors called Super-Modules arranged in a cylindrical configuration. We have conducted performance studies on one such Super-Module to prove the feasibility of the Barrel Time-of-Flight detector design. Time resolution, signal delay and amplitude drop along the length of the detector were measured and analyzed as a function of the position on the individual scintillator tiles. A time resolution of about 50 ps has been achieved, which is very important for event timing and particle identification.