FTK: A Fast Track Trigger for ATLAS

Abstract

We describe the design and expected performance of a the Fast Tracker Trigger (FTK) system for the ATLAS detector at the Large Hadron Collider. The FTK is a highly parallel hardware system designed to operate at the Level 1 trigger output rate. It is designed to provide global tracks reconstructed in the inner detector with resolution comparable to the full offline reconstruction as input of the Level 2 trigger processing. The hardware system is based on associative memories for pattern recognition and fast FPGAs for track reconstruction. The FTK is expected to dramatically improve the performance of track based isolation and b-tagging with little to no dependencies of pile-up interactions. © 2012 IOP Publishing Ltd and Sissa Medialab srl.