Trigger and data acquisition

Past LEP experiments generate data at 0.5 MByte/s from particle detectors with over a quarter of a million readout channels. The process of reading out the electronic channels, treating them, and storing the date produced by each collision for further analysis by the physicists is called "Data Acquisition". Not all beam crossings produce interesting physics "events", picking the interesting ones is the task of the "Trigger" system. In order to make sure that the data is collected in good conditions the experiment's operation has to be constantly verified. In all, at LEP experiments over 100 000 parameters were monitored, controlled, and synchronized by the "Monotoring and control" system. In the future, LHC experiments will produce as much data in a single day as a LEP detector did in a full year's running with a raw data rate of 10 - 100 MBytes/s and will have to cope with some 800 million proton-proton collisions a second of these collisions only one in 100 million million is interesting for new particle searches. These lectures will provide an introduction to the subjects of Data Acquisition, Trigger and overall Experiment Monitoring and Control with examples from LEP and LHC experiments.