Retina algorithm for heavy-ion tracking in single-event effects localization

This study presents a real-time tracking algorithm derived from the retina algorithm, designed for the rapid, real-time tracking of straight-line particle trajectories. These trajectories are detected by pixel detectors to localize single-event effects in two-dimensional space. Initially, we developed a retina algorithm to track the trajectory of a single heavy ion and achieved a positional accuracy of 40 μm. This was accomplished by analyzing trajectory samples from the simulations using a pixel sensor with a 72 × 72 pixel array and an 83 μm pixel pitch. Subsequently, we refined this approach to create an iterative retina algorithm for tracking multiple heavy-ion trajectories in single events. This iterative version demonstrated a tracking efficiency of over 97%, with a positional resolution comparable to that of single-track events. Furthermore, it exhibits significant parallelism, requires fewer resources, and is ideally suited for implementation in field-programmable gate arrays on board-level systems, facilitating real-time online trajectory tracking. © The Author(s), under exclusive licence to China Science Publishing & Media Ltd. (Science Press), Shanghai Institute of Applied Physics, the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Chinese Nuclear Society 2025.