The Acts project: track reconstruction software for HL-LHC and beyond

The reconstruction of trajectories of the charged particles in the tracking detectors of high energy physics experiments is one of the most difficult and complex tasks of event reconstruction at particle colliders. As pattern recognition algorithms exhibit combinatorial scaling to high track multiplicities, they become the largest contributor to the CPU consumption within event reconstruction, particularly at current and future hadron colliders such as the LHC, HL-LHC and FCC-hh. Current algorithms provide an extremely high standard of physics and computing performance and have been tested on billions of simulated and recorded data events. However, most algorithms were first written 20 year…