The ATLAS Level-1 Central Trigger Processor

ATLAS is a multi-purpose particle physics detector at CERN’s Large Hadron Collider where two pulsed beams of protons are brought to collision at very high energy. There are collisions every 25 ns, corresponding to a rate of 40 MHz. A three-level trigger system reduces this rate to about 200 Hz while keeping bunch crossings which potentially contain interesting processes. The Level-1 trigger, implemented in electronics and firmware, makes an initial selection in under 2.5 us with an output rate of less than 100 kHz. A key element of this is the Central Trigger Processor (CTP) which combines trigger information from the calorimeter and muon trigger processors to make the final Level-1 accept decision in under 100 ns on the basis of lists of selection criteria, implemented as a trigger menu. Timing and trigger signals are fanned out to all sub-detectors, while busy signals from all sub-detector read-out systems are collected and fed into the CTP in order to throttle the generation of Level-1 triggers.