The HYDRA pion-tracker for hypernuclei studies at R3B

Abstract: 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.