Triggering on hard probes in heavy ion collisions with CMS

Abstract

We present a study of the CMS trigger system in heavy-ion collisions. Concentrating on two physics channels, dimuons from decays of quarkonia and single jets, we evaluate a possible trigger strategy for Pb+Pb running that relies on event selection solely in the High-Level Trigger (HLT). The study is based on measurements of the timing performance of the offline algorithms and event-size distributions using full simulations. Using a trigger simulation chain, we compare the physics reach for the jet and dimuon channels using online selection in the HLT to minimum bias running. The results demonstrate the crucial role the HLT will play for CMS heavy-ion physics.