CMS Trigger System Research Articles

The CMS Level-1 trigger for LHC Run II

During LHC Run II the centre-of-mass energy of pp collisions has increased from 8 TeV up to 13 TeV and the instantaneous luminosity has progressed towards 2 × 1034 cm−2s−1. In order to guarantee a successful and ambitious physics programme under these conditions, the CMS trigger system has been upgraded. The upgraded CMS Level-1 trigger is designed to improve performance at high luminosity and large number of simultaneous inelastic collisions per crossing. The trigger design, implementation and commissioning are summarised, and performance results are described.

Commissioning of the CMS High Level Trigger

The CMS experiment will collect data from the proton-proton collisions delivered by the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at a centre-of-mass energy up to 14 TeV. The CMS trigger system is designed to cope with unprecedented luminosities and LHC bunch-crossing rates up to 40 MHz. The unique CMS trigger architecture only employs two trigger levels. The Level-1 trigger is implemented using custom electronics, while the High Level Trigger (HLT) is based on software algorithms running on a large cluster of commercial processors, the Event Filter Farm. We present the major functionalities of the CMS High Level Trigger system as of the starting of LHC beams operations in September 2008. The validation of the HLT system in the online environment with Monte Carlo simulated data and its commissioning during cosmic rays data taking campaigns are discussed in detail. We conclude with the description of the HLT operations with the first circulating LHC beams before the incident occurred the 19th September 2008.

The CMS trigger system

The CMS trigger system must reduce an input data rate from the LHC bunch-crossing frequency of 40 MHz to a rate which will be written to permanent storage. A detailed study has recently been made of the performance of this system. This paper presents key elements of the results obtained and gives details of a draft “trigger table” for the Level-1 Trigger and the High-Level Trigger selection at a “start-up” luminosity of 2× 1033 cm – 2s – 1. High efficiencies for most physics objects are attainable with a selection that remains inclusive and avoids detailed topological or other requirements on the event.

CMS online event filter software

The CMS trigger system consists of a two stage system: a first level trigger system and a large farm of processors performing the online event filtering. The presented paper gives an overview of the current status of development of the filter farm software. We present an architectural model for efficient filter farm software and show a multi-threaded event filter prototype.