4D Track Reconstruction on Free-Streaming Data with PANDA at FAIR

Abstract A new generation of accelerator-based experiments in subatomic physics is being developed, where the challenge of separating rare signal processes from background at high intensities requires a change of trigger paradigm. At the future PANDA experiment at FAIR, hardware triggers will be abandoned and instead a purely software-based system will be used. This requires novel reconstruction methods with the ability to process data from many beam–target interactions simultaneously. A 4D tracking algorithm, based on the cellular automaton, has been developed which will utilize the timing information from detector signals. Simulation studies have been performed to test its performance on the foreseen free-streaming, i.e., continuous readout from the PANDA detector, where all processing is on the software level. For this purpose, a novel quality assurance method, tailored for tracking on free-streaming data has been developed and implemented. Benchmark studies on PANDA software show that at higher interaction rates, 4D tracking performs better than the 3D algorithm in terms of efficiency, 84 $$\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:math> compared to 77 $$\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:math> . In addition, the fake track suppression is greatly improved, reducing the rate of fake tracks of “ghosts” by about 50 $$\%$$ <mml:math xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML"> <mml:mo>%</mml:mo> </mml:math> .