Hough Transform Track Reconstruction in the Cathode Strip Chambers in ATLAS

The world's largest and highest energy particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), will collide two highly energetic proton beams in an attempt to discover a wide range of new physics. Among which, the primary ambitions are the discovery of the Higgs boson and suppersymmetric particles. ATLAS, one of its primary particle detectors, was designed as a general-purpose detector covering a broad range of energies and physical processes. A special emphasis on accurate muon tracking has led the ATLAS collaboration to design a stand-alone Muon Spectrometer, an extremely large tracking system extending all the way around the detector. Due to its immense size and range, parts of the spectrometer were designed to withstand a high rate of radiation, sifting the muon signals from the rest of the signals (primarily neutrons and photons). The Cathode Strip Chambers (CSCs) are special multiwire proportional chambers placed in the high $\eta$ region on of the Muon Spectrometer, where flux of background particles is highest. Their purpose is to efficiently filter out the background particle, tracking only the muons traversing it with high degree of accuracy. In order to do that, this special algorithm was designed using a novel modification of the Hough Transform. This thesis will detail the key elements of this algorithm, how it is used for better muon track detection and parameterization, and give a preliminary evaluation of the perform ance of this algorithm.