A facility for pion-induced nuclear reaction studies with HADES

The combination of a production target for secondary beams, an optimized ion optical beam line setting, in-beam detectors for minimum ionizing particles with high rate capability, and an efficient large acceptance spectrometer around the reaction target constitutes an experimental opportunity to study in detail hadronic interactions utilizing pion beams impinging on nucleons and nuclei. For the 0.4-2.0GeV/c pion momentum regime such a facility is located at the heavy ion synchrotron accelerator SIS18 in Darmstadt (Germany). The layout of the apparatus, performance of its components and encouraging results from a first commissioning run are presented