The ATLAS muon trigger performance in pp collisions at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV in year 2012 runs

Events with muons in the final state are an important signature for many physics topics at Large Hadron Collider (LHC), for instance, searches for Higgs boson production or new phenomena, measurements on the standard model processes like top-quark, W, Z production. Thus, efficient trigger on muons in data taking and understanding its performance are crucial to perform these physics studies. At LHC high rejection power against large backgrounds, while maintaining high efficiency for rare signal events, is required for online selection at the trigger level. The ATLAS experiment employs a multi-level trigger architecture that selects the events in three sequential steps of increasing complexity and accuracy to cope with this challenging task. The L1 muon trigger system gets its input from fast muon trigger detectors. Fast sector logic boards select muon candidates, which are passed via an interface board to the central trigger processor and then to the High Level Trigger (HLT). The Muon HLT is purely software based and encompasses a level 2 trigger followed by an event filter for a staged trigger approach. It has access to the data of the precision muon detectors and other detector elements to refine the muon hypothesis. The ATLAS Muon trigger has successfully adapted to the changing environment in 2012 runs including: isolation requirements, combined trigger signatures with electron and jet trigger objects, and so-called full-scan triggers, which make use of the full event information to search for di-lepton signatures, seeded by single lepton objects. This paper reports about efficiency and general performance of the ATLAS muon trigger in pp collision at sqrt(s) = 8 TeV in year 2012 runs.