Triggering BTeV

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.