Reconstructing charged-particle trajectories in the PANDA Straw Tube Tracker using the LOcal Track Finder (LOTF) algorithm

TL;DR

The paper introduces the LOTF algorithm for reconstructing charged-particle trajectories in the PANDA Straw Tube Tracker, demonstrating high accuracy, speed, and improved z-position resolution, suitable for online data processing.

Contribution

The novel LOTF algorithm enhances track reconstruction by using local fitting and virtual nodes, outperforming existing methods in accuracy and speed.

Findings

Achieves 85% track reconstruction efficiency

Reduces median z-error by a factor of 8.7

Operates at 68,000 hits per second without parallelization

Abstract

We present the LOcal Track Finder (LOTF) algorithm, a method that performs charged-particle trajectory reconstruction using the Straw Tube Tracker, one of the central trackers of the antiProton ANnihilation at DArmstadt (PANDA) detector. The algorithm builds upon the neighboring relations of the tubes to connect individual hits and form track candidates. In addition, it uses a local fitting procedure to handle regions where several tracks overlap and utilizes a system of virtual nodes to reconstruct the z-information of the particle trajectories. We generated 30,000 events to assess the performance of our approach and compared our results to two other track reconstruction methods. LOTF has (1) an average of 85\% of found tracks, (2) the largest number of Fully Pure tracks, (3) the lowest amount of incorrect reconstructions, and (4) is significantly faster than the other two approaches. Further, we compared the z-reconstruction performance with one of the two alternative methods and show that LOTF improves the median z-error by a factor of 8.7. Finally, we tested our method using 3,750 data sets composed of 4 events each, showing that our approach handles cases in which events are mixed. The raw (without parallelization) average reconstruction rate is about 68,000 hits/s, which makes the present algorithm promising for online data selection and processing.