Track Finding

Abstract

AbstractThere is no systematic theory of track finding yet. Therefore, the first section of this chapter presents a list of basic techniques which have been successfully used, stand-alone or in combination, in past and present experiments. Among them are the conformal transformation, the Hough and the Legendre transform, cellular automata and neural networks, pattern matching, and track following by the combinatorial Kalman filter. The following section gives a brief excursion into online or real-time track finding in the collider experiments CDF, ATLAS, and CMS. As track finding in most cases delivers some candidates that do not correspond to actual particle tracks, the concluding section discusses methods for an efficient selection of valid candidates.