4D Track Reconstruction on Free-Streaming Data at PANDA at FAIR
A new generation of experiments 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 events 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 data from the PANDA detector. For this purpose, a quality assurance procedure for tracking on free-streaming data was implemented in the PANDA software. The studies show that at higher interaction rates, 4D tracking performs better than the 3D algorithm in terms of efficiency, 84% compared to 77%. The fake track suppression is also greatly improved, compared to the 3D tracking with roughly a 50% decrease in the ghost rate.