A combination of an elastic net and a Hopfield net to solve the segment linking problem in the forward tracker of the H1 detector at HERA

The H1 detector at the electron proton collider HERA at DESY in Hamburg is designed to study the products of collisions of 27.5 GeV electrons with 820 GeV protons. One of the features of the detector is the Forward Tracker, designed to accurately measure the tracks of charged particles close to the proton remnant direction. The association of the correct sub-sets of measured coordinates to the tracks becomes complicated by the high density of charged particles passing through this region. This article presents the application of a combination of an elastic net and a Hopfield net to solve a part of this track finding problem. The results are compared with those obtained using the H1 standard software package.