Front-end electronics at LHCb

Within the LHC, the beams cross one another in a detector every 25 nanoseconds, corresponding to a frequency of 40 MHz (40 million times per second). In previous years, LHCb filtered down this “event rate” to 1 MHz, using fast electronics to select the most interesting events. Those events were then processed and sifted further. But from 2022 onwards, this will change radically: the whole detector will instead read at the full rate of 40 MHz to allow event selection to be done more precisely and flexibly by the software. For this reason, the electronics of essentially all the subdetectors have been modified and the computing power of the LHCb event selection system (trigger) will increase.