Triggering BTeV

TL;DR

BTeV is a Fermilab collider experiment with a specialized forward detector designed for high-rate B and charm decay measurements, featuring a Level 1 trigger capable of processing 100 GB/s to efficiently identify B events.

Contribution

This paper presents an overview of the BTeV Level 1 trigger system, highlighting its design to handle extremely high data rates and efficiently select B decay events.

Findings

Level 1 trigger processes 100 GB/s data rate

Achieves 100:1 rejection of minimum bias events

Optimized for B and charm decay detection

Abstract

BTeV is a collider experiment at Fermilab designed for precision studies of CP violation and mixing. Unlike most collider experiments, the BTeV detector has a forward geometry that is optimized for the measurement of B and charm decays in a high-rate environment. While the rate of B production gives BTeV an advantage of almost four orders of magnitude over e+e- B factories, the BTeV Level 1 trigger must be able to accept data at a rate of 100 Gigabytes per second, reconstruct tracks and vertices, trigger on B events with high efficiency, and reject minimum bias events by a factor of 100:1. An overview of the Level 1 trigger will be presented.