Alignment validation

The four experiments, ALICE, ATLAS, CMS and LHCb are currently under construction at CERN. They will study the products of proton-proton collisions at the Large Hadron Collider. All experiments are equipped with sophisticated tracking systems, unprecedented in size and complexity. Full exploitation of both the inner detector and the muon system requires an accurate alignment of all detector elements. Alignment information is deduced from dedicated hardware alignment systems and the reconstruction of charged particles. However, the system is degenerate which means the data is insufficient to constrain all alignment degrees of freedom, so the techniques are prone to converging on wrong geometries. This deficiency necessitates validation and monitoring of the alignment. An exhaustive discussion of means to validate is subject to this document, including examples and plans from all four LHC experiments, as well as other high energy experiments