A Common Tracking Software Project

• DOI: 10.48550/arxiv.2106.13593
• Publication Date: 2022-04-13
• Authors: Xiaocong Ai; Corentin Allaire; Noemi Calace; Angéla Czirkos; Markus Elsing; Irina Ene; Ralf Farkas; Louis-Guillaume G...; Rocky Garg; Paul Gessinger; Hadrien Grasland; Heather M. Gray; Christian Gumpert; Julia Hrdinka; Benjamin Huth; Moritz Kiehn; Fabian Klimpel; Bernadette Kolbinger; Attila Krasznahorkay; Robert Langenberg; Charles Leggett; Georgiana Mania; Edward Moyse; Joana Niermann; Joseph D. Osborn; David Rousseau; Andreas Salzburger; Bastian Schlag; Lauren Tompkins; Tomohiro Yamazaki; Beomki Yeo; Jin Zhang
• Keywords: data analysis method; Physics - Instrumentation and Detectors; FOS: Physical sciences; 530; programming; Track reconstruction; 01 natural sciences; High Energy Physics - Experiment; High Energy Physics - Experiment (hep-ex); Pattern recognition; 0103 physical sciences; [PHYS.HEXP]Physics [physics]/High Energy Physics - Experiment [hep-ex]; Concurrent event reconstruction; [PHYS.PHYS.PHYS-INS-DET]Physics [physics]/Physics [physics]/Instrumentation and Detectors [physics.ins-det]; Vertex reconstruction; Collider physics; track data analysis; Instrumentation and Detectors (physics.ins-det); ATLAS; 004; charged particle: trajectory; performance; Software

AbstractThe reconstruction of the trajectories of charged particles, or track reconstruction, is a key computational challenge for particle and nuclear physics experiments. While the tuning of track reconstruction algorithms can depend strongly on details of the detector geometry, the algorithms currently in use by experiments share many common features. At the same time, the intense environment of the High-Luminosity LHC accelerator and other future experiments is expected to put even greater computational stress on track reconstruction software, motivating the development of more performant algorithms. We present here A Common Tracking Software (ACTS) toolkit, which draws on the experience with track reconstruction algorithms in the ATLAS experiment and presents them in an experiment-independent and framework-independent toolkit. It provides a set of high-level track reconstruction tools which are agnostic to the details of the detection technologies and magnetic field configuration and tested for strict thread-safety to support multi-threaded event processing. We discuss the conceptual design and technical implementation of ACTS, selected applications and performance of ACTS, and the lessons learned.