A Generalized Approach to Longitudinal Momentum Determination in Cylindrical Straw Tube Detectors

Abstract: The upcoming PANDA experiment at FAIR will be among a new generation of particle physics experiments to employ a novel event filtering system realised purely in software, i.e. a software trigger. To educate its triggering decisions, online reconstruction algorithms need to offer outstanding performance in terms of efficiency and track quality. We present a method to reconstruct longitudinal track parameters in PANDA's Straw Tube Tracker, which is general enough to be easily added to other track finding algorithms that focus on transversal reconstruction. For the pattern recognition part of this method, three approaches are employed and compared: A combinatorial path finding approach, a Hough transformation, and a recursive annealing fit. In a systematic comparison, the recursive annealing fit was found to outperform the other approaches in every category of quality parameters and reaches a reconstruction efficacy of 95% and higher.