PANDA as midrapidity detector for a future HESR Collider at FAIR
Exciting new scientific opportunities are presented for the PANDA detector at the High Energy Storage Ring in the redefined $$\overline{\text {p}} \text {p}(A)$$ p ¯ p ( A ) collider mode, HESR-C, at the Facility for Antiproton and Ion Research (FAIR) in Europe. The high luminosity, $$L \sim 10^{31}$$ L ∼ 10 31 cm $$^{-2}$$ - 2 s $$^{-1}$$ - 1 , and a wide range of intermediate and high energies, $$\sqrt{s_{\text {NN}}}$$ s NN up to 30 GeV for $$\overline{\text {p}} \text {p}(A)$$ p ¯ p ( A ) collisions will allow to explore a wide range of exciting topics in QCD, including the study of the production of excited open charm and bottom states, nuclear bound states containing heavy (anti)quarks, the interplay of hard and soft physics in the dilepton production, probing short-range correlations in nuclei, and the exploration of the early, complete $$\overline{\text {p}}$$ p ¯ -p- annihilation phase, where an initially pure Yang–Mills gluon plasma is formed.