BTeV detached vertex trigger

BTeV is a collider experiment that has been approved to run in the Tevatron at Fermilab. The experiment will conduct precision studies of CP violation using a forward-geometry detector. The detector will be optimized for high-rate detection of beauty and charm particles produced in collisions between protons and anti-protons. BTeV will trigger on beauty and charm events by taking advantage of the main difference between these heavy quark events and more typical hadronic events—the presence of detached beauty and charm decay vertices. The first stage of the BTeV trigger will receive data from a pixel vertex detector at a rate of 100 gb s−1, reconstruct tracks and vertices for every beam crossing, reject 99% of beam crossings that do not produce beauty or charm particles, and trigger on beauty events with high efficiency. An overview of the trigger design and its influence on the design of the pixel vertex detector is presented.