The new Level-1 Topological Trigger for the ATLAS experiment at the Large Hadron Collider

At the CERN Large Hadron Collider, the world’s most powerful particle accelerator, the ATLAS experiment records high-energy proton collision to investigate the properties of fundamental particles. These collisions take place at a 40 MHz, and the ATLAS trigger system selects the interesting ones, reducing the rate to 1 kHz, allowing for their storage and subsequent offline analysis. The ATLAS trigger system is organized in two levels, with increasing degree of details and of accuracy. The first level trigger reduces the event rate to 100 kHz with a decision latency of less than 2.5 micro seconds. It is composed of the calorimeter trigger, muon trigger and central trigger processor. A new component of the first-level trigger was introduced in 2015: the Topological Processor (L1Topo). It allows to use detailed real-time information from the Level-1 calorimeter and muon systems, to compute advanced kinematic quantities using state of the art FPGA processors, and to select interesting events based on several combinations of angles between jets and leptons, invariant masses, and isolation requirements. Up to 128 selection algorithms can be programmed in the L1Topo processors, making it possible to maintain ATLAS capability to record good data at high instantaneous luminosity.