The HYpernuclei-Decay at R3B Apparatus (HYDRA) tracker is a novel time projection chamber combined with a plastic scintillator wall for timing and trigger purposes. This detector is a low radiation length tracker dedicated to measuring pions from the weak decay of light hypernuclei produced from ion-ion collisions at few GeV/nucleon in the magnetic field of the large-acceptance dipole magnet GLAD at the Reactions with Relativistic Radioactive Beams (R3B) experiment at GSI-FAIR. In this paper, we describe the design of the detector and provide the results of its first characterizations.
@article{arxiv.2504.10213,
title = {The HYDRA pion-tracker for hypernuclei studies at R3B},
author = {Lian-Cheng Ji and Uwe Bonnes and Mikolaj Cwiok and Meytal Duer and Alexandru Enciu and Piotr Gasik and Joerg Hehner and Alexandre Obertelli and Shinsuke Ota and Valerii Panin and Jerome Pibernat and Dominic Rossi and Haik Simon and Yelei Sun and Simone Velardita and Frank Wienholtz and Marcin Zaremba},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2504.10213},
year = {2025}
}