Identifying merged clusters in the ATLAS strip detector

Tracking in high density environments, particularly in high energy jets, plays an important role in many physics analyses at the LHC. In such environments, there is degradation of track reconstruction performance in ATLAS due to hit-merging in the pixel and strip detectors. We present a new algorithm for determining which strip clusters come from multiple particles. The performance of this technique is found to be competitive with the existing algorithm for identifying merged pixel clusters. We also show the gain in reconstruction efficiency achieved by allowing these clusters to be shared by multiple tracks.