ARCHITECTURE AND PERFORMANCE OF THE DELPHI TRIGGER SYSTEM

This paper describes the trigger system of the DELPHI detector at LEP. It reports on the most relevant aspects of the hardware and shows the software strategies that have been developed to optimize its use. In 1993 the structure of the trigger in four decision levels has become fully operational and data collected during this period have been used to study the trigger performance. Various final state channels such as mu(+)mu(-), e(+)e(-) and hadronic events were selected and their trigger efficiencies were calculated as a function of the polar angle theta. The results obtained indicate that, for any of the event topologies considered, the DELPHI trigger efficiency is independent of the a angle, and, furthermore, the attained efficiency values are determined to be very close to 100% within an extremely good precision. This is a consequence of the high redundancy presently provided by all the DELPHI subdetectors. In addition to this analysis, events containing isolated particles either in the barrel or in the forward regions have been selected to evaluate the trigger response to single particles. Hence, trigger efficiencies for single particles have also been computed for charged tracks as a function of the momentum and for photons as a function of the deposited electromagnetic energy.