A space-time tracking algorithm for high occupancy events at future colliders

Abstract: We propose to explore the potential advantages of a new class of tracking algorithms loosely inspired by the Hough transform concept and where we include the time of arrival of each hit as an additional coordinate to be treated in the same way as a spatial coordinate. A remarkable property of this algorithm is that the execution time is proportional to the total number of hits to be processed, making it particularly attractive for high occupancy situations expected at future colliders. The particular structure of the algorithm also lends itself naturally to parallel hardware implementations which, combined to its intrinsic flexibility, should provide a powerful tool for triggering at future colliders. To probe the effectiveness of the algorithm, we apply it to a quasi-realistic simulated environment of a possible future muon collider experiment and report the performance.