Track reconstruction in CMS high luminosity environment

Abstract

The CMS tracker is the largest silicon detector ever built, covering 200 square meters and providing an average of 14 high-precision measurements per track. Tracking is essential for the reconstruction of objects like jets, muons, electrons and tau leptons starting from the raw data from the silicon pixel and strip detectors. Track reconstruction is widely used also at trigger level as it improves objects tagging and resolution.The CMS tracking code is organized in several levels, known as iterative steps, each optimized to reconstruct a class of particle trajectories, as the ones of particles originating from the primary vertex or displaced tracks from particles resulting from secondary vertices. Each iterative step consists of seeding, pattern recognition and fitting by a kalman filter, and a final filtering and cleaning. Each subsequent step works on hits not yet associated to a reconstructed particle trajectory.The CMS tracking code is continuously evolving to make the reconstruction computing load compatible with the increasing instantaneous luminosity of LHC, resulting in a large number of primary vertices and tracks per bunch crossing. This is achieved by optimizing the iterative steps and by using new software techniques. Tracking algorithms used in CMS are described; physics and computing performances are discussed with respect to Run 1 and Run 2 physics program and within CMS future upgrades.