An innovative seeding technique for photon conversion reconstruction at CMS

The conversion of photons into electron-positron pairs in the detector material is a nuisance in the event reconstruction of high energy physics experiments, since the measurement of the electromagnetic component of interaction products results degraded. Nonetheless this unavoidable detector effect can also be extremely useful. The reconstruction of photon conversions can be used to probe the detector material and to accurately measure soft photons that come from radiative decays in heavy flavor physics. In fact a converted photon can be measured with very high momentum resolution by exploiting the excellent reconstruction of charged tracks of a tracking detector as the one of CMS at LHC. The main issue is that photon conversion tracks are difficult to reconstruct for standard reconstruction algorithms. They are typically soft and very displaced from the primary interaction vertex. An innovative seeding technique that exploits the peculiar photon conversion topology, successfully applied in the CMS track reconstruction sequence, is presented. The performances of this technique and the substantial enhancement of photon conversion reconstruction efficiency are discussed. Application examples are given.