A novel calorimeter trigger concept: The jet trigger of the H1 experiment at HERA

We report on a novel trigger for the liquid argon calorimeter which was installed in the H1 Experiment at HERA. This trigger, called the “Jet Trigger”, was running at level 1 and implemented a real-time cluster algorithm. Within only 800 ns, the Jet Trigger algorithm found local energy maxima in the calorimeter, summed their immediate neighbors, sorted the resulting jets by energy, and applied topological conditions for the final level 1 trigger decision. The Jet Trigger was in operation from the year 2006 until the end of the HERA running in the summer of 2007. With the Jet Trigger it was possible to substantially reduce the thresholds for triggering on electrons and jets, giving access to a largely extended phase space for physical observables which could not have been reached in H1 before. The concepts of the Jet Trigger may be an interesting upgrade option for the LHC experiments.