A Novel Highly Ionizing Particle Trigger using the ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker

The ATLAS Transition Radiation Tracker (TRT) is an important part of the experiment’s charged particle tracking system. It also provides the ability to discriminate electrons from pions efficiently using large signal amplitudes induced in the TRT straw tubes by transition radiation. This amplitude information can also be used to identify heavily ionizing particles, such as monopoles, or Q-balls, that traverse the straws. Because of their large ionization losses, these particles can range out before they reach the ATLAS calorimeter, making them difficult to identify by the experiment’s first level trigger. Much of this inefficiency could be regained by making use of a feature of the TRT electronics that allows fast access to information on whether large-amplitude signals were produced in regions of the detector. A modest upgrade to existing electronics could allow triggers sensitive to heavily ionizing particles at level-1 to be constructed by counting such large-amplitude signals in roads corresponding to the trajectories of high momentum tracks. We describe design studies aimed at producing such a trigger in ATLAS.