CERBEROS: A tracking system for secondary pion beams at the HADES spectrometer

In 2014 the HADES collaboration performed two successful physics production runs with secondary pion beams. Since secondary pion beams are strongly defocussed in position and momentum, two fast tracking stations were installed along the pion beam chicane following the pion production target providing the momentum measurement of each individual pion. The momentum is reconstructed using the position information of every hit detected by the tracking stations and the beam optics transport calculation with a resolution below 0.5% playing an important role in terms of the exclusive analysis of investigated reactions. Both tracking stations consist of a double-sided silicon strip sensor with a large active area (10×10^cm2). To guarantee fast tracking, the sensors are read out with the n-XYTER ASIC chip. Due to its self-triggering architecture and local storage capability, the chip enables on-line tracking at high rates (dN/dt>¹⁰⁶part/s). The TRB3 read out board on which the trigger logic is implemented integrates the system into the HADES DAQ. In this report we are showing the results obtained during the calibration experiment with a monochromatic proton beam set at seven different momenta centred around 2.68 GeV/c. Also the excellent performance achieved during the production campaign with a pion beam are presented.