English

Towards 6D Tracking: A Study Of Using Fast-Timing For Measuring Track Position, Time, And Angles

Instrumentation and Detectors 2026-05-26 v1 High Energy Physics - Experiment

Abstract

Current and next-generation particle tracking detectors will incorporate precision timing capabilities with resolutions approaching tens of picoseconds. Using Technology Computer-Aided Design (TCAD) simulations of Low-Gain Avalanche Diode (LGAD) detectors, we demonstrate that oblique particle incidence induces systematic timing variations of hundreds of picoseconds across multiple pixels. We derive an analytical linear model relating inter-pixel timing differences to incident track angles, enabling single-layer angular reconstruction with few-degree precision. Stochastic energy loss fluctuations (Landau fluctuations) impose fundamental limits on both angular resolution and reconstruction efficiency. Comparison with neural network approaches demonstrates that the linear model achieves near-optimal angular resolution, indicating that the physics of charge collection geometry, rather than algorithmic sophistication, dominates the achievable performance.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2605.24736,
  title  = {Towards 6D Tracking: A Study Of Using Fast-Timing For Measuring Track Position, Time, And Angles},
  author = {Victor Turbiner and Elena Villhauer and Abhiraj Gupta and Michael Cardiff and Julie Segal and Christopher J. Kenney and Mark Horowitz and Ariel Schwartzman and Angelo Dragone},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.24736},
  year   = {2026}
}
R2 v1 2026-07-22T07:30:22.113Z