The design and simulated performance of a fast Level 1 track trigger for the ATLAS High Luminosity Upgrade

The ATLAS experiment at the High Luminosity LHC will face a fivefold increase in the number of interactions per bunch crossing relative to the ongoing Run 2. This will require a proportional improvement in rejection power at the earliest levels of the detector trigger system, while preserving good signal efficiency. One critical aspect of this improvement will be the implementation of precise track reconstruction, through which sharper trigger turn-on curves can be achieved, and b-tagging and tau-tagging techniques can in principle be implemented. The challenge of such a project comes in the development of a fast, custom electronic device integrated in the hardware based first trigger level of the experiment. This article will discuss the requirements, architecture and projected performance of the system in terms of tracking, timing and physics, based on detailed simulations. Studies are carried out using data from the strip subsystem only or both strip and pixel subsystems.