Level-1 Trigger Systems for LHC Experiments

Francesca Pastore

INFN Rome, Italy, P. le Aldo Moro 00185

francesca.pastore@roma1.infn.it

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN is expected to collide proton

bunches at a rate of 40 MHz. The challenge of the rst level trigger systems
of the LHC experiments is to reduce the original collision rate by a factor of
O(1000) with dedicated hardware trigger systems. Robustness of the systems
and ne tuning of their parameters are needed to reach these requirements.
In this paper the ATLAS and CMS Level-1 systems are presented, with the
purpose of describing the current status of studies on the performance of each
subsystem, the tuning of the conguration parameters and the trigger menus.
Both systems are currently under the commissioning phase.

1 Trigger strategy at LHC

The LHC is a proton-proton collider designed to collide beams at 14 TeV

center-of-mass energy, in order to allow the investigation of fundamental
physics at the TeV scale. ATLAS and CMS are the multi-purpose experi-
ments dedicated to these studies in two dierent collision regions of the LHC
ring, and have indeed the same requirements, even if show dierent designs.
The current LHC machine desgin foresees only about 80% of the bunches
lled, so the eective bunch crossing rate will be reduced to 32 MHz by design.
Two luminosity scenarios are foreseen. The rst two years after start-up the
machine will run with low luminosity (L = 2 1033 cm2 s1 ), with a cor-
responding integrated luminosity of 10 fb1 /year; then the high luminosity
scenario will be reached (L = 1034 cm2 s1 , 100 fb1 /year). The average
number of inelastic non-diractive interactions per bunch is 17.3 at high and
3.5 at low luminosity, hence a collision rate of 109 Hz is expected. Total non-
diractive cross section at the nominal energy is about 70 mb, with a huge
range of production cross-sections and rates.
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1.1 Level-1 Strategy

The full trigger system is designed to perform a data reduction from 32 MHz
down to O(100) Hz, via dierent trigger levels. The trigger relies on the con-
cept of trigger objects, which are rst crudely identied and selected at the
rst level, level-1, and then reconstruction and selection is progressively rened
by the high-level trigger, where the full granularity of sub-detectors is avail-
able. Level-1 selection is based on inclusive high pT physics, with low multi-
plicity (single or di-objects), which are sensitive to New Physics and including
Standard Model physics to overlap with Tevatron results. The trigger strategy
is to allow reasonable safety factors in the accepted rates to account for uncer-
tainties due to physics (cross-sections and cavern or other backgrounds) and
to detectors performances. The redundancy of the selection criteria (trigger
menus) leads to high trigger eciency and gives the possibility to measure
it from data, while the exibility allows to face possible variations of LHC
luminosity, which leads to changes in the event characteristics due to pile-up.
Typical trigger objects are electrons and photons, muons, jets and com-
binations of jets or tau with general quantities like missing transverse energy
ET . The allocation of the bandwidth across dierent trigger objects in a trig-
ger menu is equally divided, so that applying a safety factor (SF = 3), each
objects must contribute with about 4/8 kHz at low/high luminosity. Objects
are selected on the base of their transverse momentum (pT ), so the study of
the rate versus pT threshold is crucial in order to control the nal performance
of the system. Due to detector and physics uncertainties, the eective require-
ments on the pT threshold must be studied, that is the value at which the
level-1 trigger is 95% ecient. This is described in the turn-on curves, which
show the dependency of the trigger eciency on the applied pT threshold. An
example of trigger table is shown in Fig. 1, where the latest results for CMS
high luminosity scenario is presented.

Fig. 1. Example of CMS level-1 trigger table with high luminosity scenario [1]
 Level-1 Trigger Systems for LHC Experiments 305

2 ATLAS and CMS Level-1 Triggers

The level-1 trigger system designs in ATLAS [2] and CMS [3] have the same
requirements. They must ensure a rate reduction of the order of 104 105 and
must be characterized by a good bunch crossing (BC) identication capabil-
ity. The latter requires an absolute synchronization of the system and binds
the functionality of all the components. Logic decisions are taken by cus-
tom electronics (based on commercial FPGAs or custom ASICs) working at
more then 40 MHz with a xed latency and using deep buers to hold data
in pipelines. Trigger processors apply simple selection criteria based on pro-
grammable thresholds on coarse or full granularity information. Fast detector
responses and data movement are crucial. Both trigger systems architecture
include one central trigger processor which takes the nal decision starting
from the information coming from the calorimeter and the muon trigger sys-
tems. ATLAS and CMS dier in some design principles. They have dierent
magnetic eld structure, since ATLAS works with air-core toroids, while CMS
is characterized by a strong (4 Tesla) solenoid. The ATLAS muon system have
dedicated trigger chambers (RPC and TGC), with low multiple scattering due
to the air-core structure, while CMS focuses on the high bending power of the
magnets, instrumenting the return yoke with independent trigger systems. The
electromagnetic calorimetry is based on sampling systems in ATLAS (liquid
Argon) and on homogeneous systems in CMS (lead tungstate). The trigger
architecture is also dierent, since ATLAS minimizes data ow across trigger
levels using the Region of Interest technique, while CMS invests on commercial
technologies for data processing and transmission (Gbit/s networks). ATLAS
trigger is divided in three levels, in which the level-2 trigger, completely soft-
ware, makes use of a dedicated and complex architecture of processors and
networks to select among the regions already pointed by the level-1 trigger
(called Region of Interest, 2/event on average). In CMS the trigger system
is based on two physical levels, in which the high-level trigger makes use of
a single farm of processors for successive partial event reconstructions and
selections.

2.1 Calorimeter Triggers

Calorimeter trigger front-end electronics is dedicated to digitization of the

analogue signals and conversion into ET using look-up-tables. For a total ge-
ometrical coverage, calorimeter signals are summed together to form trigger
towers with a xed granularity, covering a dened region (0.1 0.1
in ATLAS, 0.87 0.87 in CMS ECAL) and chosen as a balance between re-
jection of background and complexity of the trigger processor. A peak nder
algorithms is dedicated to the BC identication, while a sliding window tech-
nique is used to nd the candidate trigger tower. Summation of hadron and
electromagnetic contributions gives the ET value in order to provide sharp
turn-on curves with the true energy of the particles.
306 Francesca Pastore

Fig. 2. The performance of CMS L1 trigger for single electrons: (left) turn-on curves
at dierent thresholds;(center, right) rate versus ET at low and high luminosity [1]

In the electromagnetic calorimeter, the trigger also uses the compactness

of the shower, which signs the presence of an electron or photon. The isola-
tion criteria requires two separate conditions based on longitudinal and lateral
shower prole: small amount of energy in the region surrounding the cluster
and a small energy deposit in the hadronic calorimeter. The electron/photon
tunr-on curves for dierent thresholds in CMS, and the corresponding ex-
pected rates are shown in Fig. 2. As an example, the CMS electron/photon
25 GeV selection shows a 95% eciency at 31 GeV and 1.9 kHz rate is expected.
In ATLAS the electromagnetic trigger, which is the highest level-1 rate from
the calorimeter, will accept events at 20 kHz with a 30 GeV transverse energy
threshold at the nominal luminosity.
Jet and tau trigger algorithms use the transverse energy sums computed in
wider calorimeter regions and require a central maximum and over threshold
neighbors to suppress noise. The choice of Level-1 thresholds and prescales
are under study, and is based on an equal distribution of rates among the jet
ET spectrum.
Transverse energy sums can be used for dierent trigger purposes. Trigger
based on the total and the missing ET selections, dened by a threshold and
a prescaling factor, can be used also for input to the luminosity monitor. The
scalar sum of the ET of the jets can capture high jet multiplicity events with
one low-energy jet and is less sensitive to noise and pile-up. Electromagnetic
and hadronic isolation provide powerful jet rejection, while under-thresholds
ET values compute the Quiet or the MIP bits (depending on the presence
of hadronic clusters), used in the global muon trigger.

2.2 Muon Triggers

The muon systems in ATLAS and CMS use dierent bending planes to mea-
sure the transverse momentum ( in ATLAS and in CMS). Both must
ensure a good pT resolution in a wide spectrum and include dedicated low-pT
systems for B-physics studies. The CMS muon trigger includes three dierent
 Level-1 Trigger Systems for LHC Experiments 307

Fig. 3. The ATLAS L1 muon trigger: (left, center) turn-on curves for low and high
pT systems [4];(right) expected rates versus luminosity for the low pT system

sub-detectors: DT and CSC chambers for muon selection, RPCs for BC iden-
tication. The formers select muon tracks reconstructed from segments in the
stations and assign them a pT using the angular distance from the interaction
point. The RPC algorithms apply a pattern recognition based on a list of
possible values identied by a pT threshold.
In ATLAS the muon trigger select muons on the basis of their track devia-
tion from the innite momentum track in the plane. This system has a high
degree of redundancy (two independent systems for low and high pT tracks,
use of the second view to reject fake muons induced by noise and physics
background) and a strong BC identication power. Due to the air-toroid struc-
ture, the study of cavern background is mandatory [5], in particular for the
low-pT systems, more sensitive to accidental background due to the reduced
redundancy. Turn-on curves for low and high-pT systems are shown in Fig. 3,
together with the expected rate dependency on luminosity.

3 Conclusions and Acknowledge

ATLAS and CMS are currently in the nal installation phase, with the com-
missioning of the trigger systems just started, waiting for the rst LHC colli-
sions in 2008. Id like to thanks Dr. M. Dellavalle for his precious suggestions.

References
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2. ATLAS Coll., ATLAS TDR, CERN/LHCC/99-15, Vol. II
3. CMS Coll., The Level-1 Trigger, TDR, CERN/LHCC 2000-038
4. A. Aloiso et al., Proc. 14th IEEE-NPSS RT Conf. 2005, ATL-CONF-2006-004
5. F. Pastore et al., Nucl. Instr. Meth. A 518 (2004) 529531