Trigger R&D for CMS at SLHC

CERN has made public a comprehensive plan for upgrading the LHC proton-proton accelerator to provide increased luminosity commonly referred to as Super LHC (SLHC) [1]. The plan envisages two phases of upgrades during which the LHC luminosity increases gradually to reach between 6-7×1034 cm-2sec-1. Over the past year, CMS has responded with a series of workshops and studies which have defined the roadmap for upgrading the experiment to cope with the SLHC environment. Increased luminosity will result in increased backgrounds and challenges for CMS and a major part of the CMS upgrade plan is a new Level-1 Trigger (L1T) system which will be able to cope with the high background environment at the SLHC. Two major CMS milestones will define the evolution of the CMS trigger upgrades: The change of the Hadronic Calorimeter electronics during phase-I and the introduction of the track trigger during phase-II. This paper outlines alternative designs for a new trigger system and the consequences for cost, latency, complexity and flexibility. In particular, it looks at how the trigger geometry of CMS could be mapped onto the latest generation of hardware while remaining backwards compatible with current infrastructure. A separate paper presented at this conference [2] looks at what could be possible if large parts of the trigger system were changed, or additional hardware added to create a time multiplexed trigger system.