Real time data analysis with the ATLAS Trigger at the LHC in Run-2

TL;DR

This paper reviews the enhancements and performance of the ATLAS trigger system during LHC Run-2, highlighting hardware and software upgrades that improved real-time data analysis despite increased pile-up.

Contribution

It introduces new hardware and software trigger systems designed for real-time analysis at higher event rates in LHC Run-2, demonstrating their robustness and efficiency.

Findings

Trigger system maintained high efficiency despite increased pile-up

Hardware upgrades enabled real-time event topology analysis

Trigger menu showed minor modifications despite operational challenges

Abstract

The trigger selection capabilities of the ATLAS detector have been significantly enhanced for the LHC Run- 2 in order to cope with the higher event rates and with the large number of simultaneous interactions (pile-up) per protonproton bunch crossing. A new hardware system, designed to analyse real time event-topologies at Level-1 came to full use in 2017. A hardware-based track reconstruction system, expected to be used real-time in 2018, is designed to provide track information to the high-level software trigger at its full input rate. The high-level trigger selections are largely relying on offline-like reconstruction techniques, and in some cases multivariate analysis methods. Despite the sudden change in LHC operations during the second half of 2017, which caused an increase in pile-up and therefore also in CPU usage of the trigger algorithms, the set of triggers (so called trigger menu) running online has undergone only minor modifications thanks to the robustness and redundancy of the trigger system, and the use of a levelling luminosity scheme in agreement with LHC and other experiments. This presentation gives a brief yet comprehensive review of the real-time performance of the ATLAS trigger system in 2017. Considerations will be presented on the most relevant parameters of the trigger (efficiency to collect signal and output data rate) as well as details on some aspects of the algorithms which are run real-time on the High Level Trigger CPU farm.