A novel approach to track finding in a drift tube chamber

Drift tube chambers are commonly used in many experiments in High Energy Physics (HEP). This paper addresses the problem of particle track finding in a drift tube chamber. Although drift tubes have, in general, a high efficiency to detect the passage of particles, in a high radiation background some of the particle hits will be masked by background hits. Under the assumption of high tube efficiency, a novel track finding algorithm, denoted as the Drift Tube Hough Transform (DTHT) algorithm, is presented. The DTHT algorithm uses the possible explanations for a lack of particle hits as additional information, and takes into account all possible scenarios that may occur in the tubes. The DTHT is implemented with a novel extension of the Hough transform and employs a ``detect before estimate'' approach that first finds the track candidates and then estimates the track parameters. In order to evaluate the performance of the DTHT algorithm, the algorithm was applied to the Monitored Drift Tube (MDT) of the ATLAS experiment and tested using a muon test beam in a high radiation background. It is shown that the use of the additional information reduces the number of fake track rate significantly. A comparison between the DTHT algorithm and the currently best performed program in the ATLAS software, demonstrated that the DTHT algorithm can achieve higher efficiency while reducing the algorithm complexity.