  The antiproton experiment PANDA at FAIR is designed to bring hadron physics
to a new level in terms of scope, precision and accuracy. In this work, its
unique capability for studies of hyperons is outlined. We discuss ground-state
hyperons as diagnostic tools to study non-perturbative aspects of the strong
interaction, and fundamental symmetries. New simulation studies have been
carried out for two benchmark hyperon-antihyperon production channels:
$\bar{p}p \to \bar{\Lambda}\Lambda$ and $\bar{p}p \to \bar{\Xi}^+\Xi^-$. The
results, presented in detail in this paper, show that hyperon-antihyperon pairs
from these reactions can be exclusively reconstructed with high efficiency and
very low background contamination. In addition, the polarisation and spin
correlations have been studied, exploiting the weak, self-analysing decay of
hyperons and antihyperons. Two independent approaches to the finite efficiency
have been applied and evaluated: one standard multidimensional efficiency
correction approach, and one efficiency independent approach. The applicability
of the latter was thoroughly evaluated for all channels, beam momenta and
observables. The standard method yields good results in all cases, and shows
that spin observables can be studied with high precision and accuracy already
in the first phase of data taking with PANDA.
