The PANDA experiment at FAIR

The PANDA (antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt) experiment is one of the major projects in preparation at the upcoming FAIR facility in Darmstadt, Germany. It will study interactions between antiprotons and protons or nuclei in the momentum range from 1.5 GeV/c to 15 GeV/c. The PANDA scientific program will address a wide range of topics, all aiming at improving our understanding of the strong interaction and hadron structure. The PANDA detector is a general-purpose spectrometer that will collect high quality and high statistics data in the fields of meson spectroscopy, baryon-antibaryon production, baryon spectroscopy, hypernuclear physics, hadron properties in the nuclear medium, and nucleon structure. This paper reviews some of the main physics topics of the experiment, together with a presentation of the detector.