Track reconstruction of particle interactions in long crystals with large bending

The possibility to deflect hadron beams precisely through angles of multi-mrad is important for several future applications, and magnets are not suitable for this purpose. Crystal channeling provides a means to do this, but is not well studied for such deflections. Measurements of the interactions of charged particles with several cm long crystals with large bending have been obtained by the UA9 collaboration. These crystals have a bending 100 times larger and a length along the beam direction up to 40 times longer than the ones presently used by UA9 in the CERN accelerators. To assess their properties and quality, the crystals have been investigated in the CERN North Area with a Super Proton Synchrotron beam of mixed hadrons at 180 GeV. The UA9 tracking telescope has been adapted to collect data with these particular crystals. A new track reconstruction method is described which was required to obtain the results reported, and has been used in the present study to validate the methodology, so that detailed assessments of future systems can be made.