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CMS Trigger System

Overview

Teaching: 10 min
Exercises: 0 min
Questions

  • What is the CMS trigger system and why is it needed?

  • What is a trigger path in CMS?

  • How does the trigger depend on instantaneous luminosity and why are prescales necessary?

  • What do streams and datasets have to do with triggers?

Objectives

  • Learn about what the CMS trigger system is

  • Understand the basic concept of trigger paths

  • Understand the necessity of prescaling

  • Learn how the trigger system allows for the organization of CMSSW data in streams and datasets.

The CMS acquisition and trigger systems

Collisions at the LHC happen at a rate close to 40 million per second (40 MHz). Once each collision is sensed by the different subdetectors, the amount of information they generate corresponds to about what you can fit in a 1 MB file. If we were to record every single collision, it is said (you can do the math) that one can probably fill out all the available disk space in the world in a few days!

Not all collisions that happen at the LHC are interesting. We would like to keep the interesting ones and, most importantly, do not miss the discovery-quality ones. In order to achieve that we need a Trigger.

Before we jump into the details for the trigger system, let’s agree on some terminology:

The trigger system

Deciding on which events to record is the main purpose of the trigger system. It is like determining which events to record by taking a quick picture of it and, even though a bit blurry, decide whether it is interesting to keep or not for a future, more thorough inspection.

CMS does this in two main steps. The first one, the Level 1 trigger (L1), implemented in hardware (fast FPGAs), reduces the input rate of 40 Mhz to around 100 KHz. The other step is the High Level Trigger (HLT), run on commercial machines with good-old C++ and Python, where the input rate is leveled around the maximum available budget of around 2 KHz.

There are hundreds of different triggers in CMS. Each one of them is designed to pick certain types of events, with different intensities and topologies. For instance the HLT_Mu20 trigger, will select events with at least one muon with 20 GeV of transverse momentum.

At the HLT level, which takes L1 as input, triggers are implemented using CMSSW code using pieces of it (modules) that can be arranged to achieve the desired result: selecting specific kinds of events. Computationally, triggers are just Paths in the CMSSW sense, and one could extract a lot of information by exploring the Python configuration of these paths.

At the end of the configuration file, we could have something like

process.mypath = cms.Path (process.m1+process.m2+process.s1+process.m3)

, where m1, m2, m3 could be CMSSW modules (individual EDAnalyzers, EDFilters, EDProducers, etc.) and s1 could be a Sequence of modules.

An example of such an arrangement for an HLT trigger looks like:

process.HLT_Mu20_v2 = cms.Path( process.HLTBeginSequence + process.hltL1sL1SingleMu16 + process.hltPreMu20 + process.hltL1fL1sMu16L1Filtered0 + process.HLTL2muonrecoSequence + process.hltL2fL1sMu16L1f0L2Filtered10Q + process.HLTL3muonrecoSequence + process.hltL3fL1sMu16L1f0L2f10QL3Filtered20Q + process.HLTEndSequence )

Finally, triggers are code, and those pieces of code are constantly changing. Modifications to a trigger could imply a different version identifier. For instance, our HLT_Mu20 could actually be HLT_Mu15_v1 or HLT_Mu15_v2, etc., depending on the version. Therefore, it is completely normal that the trigger names can change from run to run.

Prescales

The need for prescales (and its meaning) is evident if one thinks of different physics processes having different cross sections. It is a lot more likely to record one minimum bias event, than an event where a Z boson is produced. Even less likely is to record an event with a Higgs boson. We could have triggers named, say, HLT_ZBosonRecorder for the one in charge of filtering Z-carrying events, or HLT_HiggsBosonRecorder for the one accepting Higgses (the actual names are more sophisticated and complex than that, of course.) The prescales are designed to keep these inputs under control by, for instance, recording just 1 out of 100 collisions that produce a likely Z boson, or 1 out of 1 collisions that produce a potential Higgs boson. In the former case, the prescale would be 100, while for the latter it would be 1; if a trigger has a prescale of 1, i.e., records every single event it identifies, we call it unprescaled.

Maybe not so evident is the need for trigger prescale changes for keeping up with luminosity changes. As the luminosity drops, prescales can be relaxed, and therefore could change from to run in the same fill.

A trigger can be prescaled at L1 as well as the HLT levels. L1 triggers have their own nomenclature and can be used as HLT trigger seeds.

Triggers, streams and datasets

After events are accepted by possibly more than one type of trigger, they are streamed in different categories, called streams and then classified and arranged in primary datasets. Most, but not all, of the datasets belonging to the stream A, the physics stream, are or will become available as CMS Open Data.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that:

Key Points

  • The CMS trigger system filters uninteresting events, keeping the budget high for the flow of interesting data.

  • Computationally, a trigger is a CMSSW path, which is composed of several software modules.

  • Trigger prescales allow the data acquisition to adjust to changes in instantaneous luminosity while keeping the rate of incomming data under control

  • The trigger systems allows for the classification and organization of datasets by physics objects of interest

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