Vertex reconstruction in the ATLAS experiment at the LHC

In the harsh environment of the Large Hadron Collider at CERN (design luminosity of 10³⁴ cm⁻² s⁻¹) efficient reconstruction of vertices is crucial for many physics analyses. Described in this paper are the strategies for vertex reconstruction used in the ATLAS experiment and their implementation in the software framework Athena. The algorithms for the reconstruction of primary and secondary vertices as well as for finding of photon conversions and vertex reconstruction in jets are described. A special emphasis is made on the vertex fitting with application of additional constraints. The implementation of mentioned algorithms follows a very modular design based on object-oriented C++ and use of abstract interfaces. The user-friendly concept allows event reconstruction and physics analyses to compare and optimize their choice among different vertex reconstruction strategies. The performance of implemented algorithms has been studied on a variety of Monte Carlo samples and results are presented.