A novel approach to track finding in a drift tube chamber

Abstract

Drift tube chambers are commonly used in many experiments in High EnergyPhysics (HEP). This paper addresses the problem of particle track finding in a drift tubechamber. Although drift tubes have, in general, a high efficiency to detect the passage ofparticles, in a high radiation background some of the particle hits will be masked by backgroundhits. Under the assumption of high tube efficiency, a novel track finding algorithm, denoted asthe Drift Tube Hough Transform (DTHT) algorithm, is presented. The DTHT algorithm usesthe possible explanations for a lack of particle hits as additional information, and takes intoaccount all possible scenarios that may occur in the tubes. The DTHT is implemented with anovel extension of the Hough transform and employs a ``detect before estimate'' approach thatfirst finds the track candidates and then estimates the track parameters. In order to evaluate theperformance of the DTHT algorithm, the algorithm was applied to the Monitored Drift Tube(MDT) of the ATLAS experiment and tested using a muon test beam in a high radiationbackground. It is shown that the use of the additional information reduces the number of faketrack rate significantly. A comparison between the DTHT algorithm and the currently bestperformed program in the ATLAS software, demonstrated that the DTHT algorithm can achievehigher efficiency while reducing the algorithm complexity.