Performance of the CMS Level-1 Trigger

Abstract

The first level trigger of the CMS experiment is comprised of custom electronics that process data from the electromagnetic and hadron calorimeters and three technologies of muon detectors in order to select the most interesting events from LHC collisions, such as those consistent with the production and decay of the Higgs boson. The rate of events selected by this Level-1 trigger must be reduced from the beam crossing frequency to no more than 100 kHz further processing can occur, a major challenge since the LHC instantaneous luminosity has increased by six orders of magnitude since the start of operations to more than 6E33 cm-2s-1 today. The performance of the Level-1 trigger, in terms of rates and efficiencies of the main objects and trigger algorithms, as measured from LHC proton collisions at 7 and 8 TeV center-of-mass energies is presented here.