Vertex Reconstruction at STAR: Overview and Performance Evaluation

The STAR experiment at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) has a rich physics program ranging from studies of the Quark Gluon Plasma to the exploration of the spin structure of the proton. Many measurements carried out by the STAR collaboration rely on the efficient reconstruction and precise knowledge of the position of the primary-interaction vertex. Throughout the years two main vertex finders have been predominantly utilized in event reconstruction by the experiment: MinutVF and PPV with their application domains focusing on heavy ion and proton-proton events respectively. In this work we give a brief overview and discuss recent improvements to the vertex finding algorithms implemented in the STAR software library. In our studies we focus on the finding efficiency and the quality of the reconstructed primary vertex. We examine the effect of an additional constraint, imposed by an independent measurement of the beam line position, when it is applied during the fit. We evaluate the significance of the improved primary vertex resolution on identification of the secondary decay vertices occurring inside the beam pipe. Finally, we present a method and its software implementation developed to measure the performance of the primary vertex reconstruction algorithms.