The New Global Muon Trigger of the CMS Experiment

Abstract

For the 2016 physics data runs, the L1 trigger system of the compact muon solenoid (CMS) experiment underwent a major upgrade to cope with the increasing instantaneous luminosity of the CERN LHC whilst maintaining a high event selection efficiency for the CMS physics program. Most subsystem specific trigger processor boards were replaced with powerful general purpose processor boards, conforming to the MicroTCA standard, whose tasks are performed by firmware on an field-programmable gate array of the Xilinx Virtex 7 family. Furthermore, the muon trigger system moved from a subsystem centered approach, where each of the three muon detector systems provides muon candidates to the global muon trigger (GMT), to a region-based system, where muon track finders (TFs) combine information from the subsystems to generate muon candidates in three detector regions that are then sent to the upgraded GMT. The upgraded GMT receives up to 108 muons from the processors of the muon TFs in the barrel, overlap, and endcap detector regions. The muons are sorted in two steps and duplicates are identified for removal. The first step treats muons from different processors of a TF in one detector region. Muons from TFs in different detector regions are compared in the second step. An isolation variable is calculated, using energy sums from the calorimeter trigger and added to each of the best eight muons before they are sent to the upgraded global trigger (GT) where the final trigger decision is made. The upgraded GMT algorithm is implemented on a general purpose processor board that uses optical links at 10 Gb/s to receive the input data from the muon TFs and the calorimeter energy sums, and to send the selected muon candidates to the upgraded GT.