L0 trigger for the EMCal detector of the ALICE experiment

The ALICE experiment at the CERN Large Hadron Collider (LHC) accelerator was designed to study ultra-relativistic heavy-ion collisions. The ALICE Electromagnetic Calorimeter (EMCal) was built to provide measurement of photons, electrons, and jets, and trigger selection of hard-QCD events containing them. The EMCal single-shower L0 trigger, which triggers on large energy deposit within a 4×4 tower sliding window, became operational in 2010. The implementation of the real-time FPGA based algorithm optimized to provide a fast L0 decision is presented.