The ATLAS b-jet Trigger

The ATLAS detector, at the LHC, has a three-level trigger, which selects events relevant for the physics goals of the experiment. The identification of jets arising from bottom quark production is important in many analyses. The b-tagging at the ATLAS Trigger relies on the fragmentation of the b quark, which generates a B hadron, that retains most of the parent quark’s momentum (∼ 70%). Furthermore, the high b quark mass results in decay products with high momenta with respect to the jet axis. The lifetime tagger relies on the the relatively long lifetime of the B hadrons (∼ 1.6 ps in their rest frame), which allows them to have a long decay length. Due to the large mass of the B hadron, the tracks reconstructed from this decay often have large impact parameters, compared to prompt jets. The algorithms exploit this by identifying tracks from the B hadron decay which are displaced from the primary interaction vertex and thus, indicate that a long-lived particle was present. The latest performance results with 2011 data are shown.