A Fast Track Trigger for the H1 collaboration

A new Fast Track Trigger was built for the H1 Experiment at the electron–proton collider HERA. This trigger allows the full three-dimensional reconstruction of all charged tracks measured in the central drift chamber within 25 μs. Particles are reconstructed down to 100 MeV in a high track multiplicity environment with a momentum resolution of better than 3% for 1 GeV tracks. This new device is thus ideally suited to trigger on exclusive final states by identifying particle resonances in e.g. open heavy quark or vector meson production. The trigger makes use of highly parallel track reconstruction algorithms implemented in modern electronics by exploiting high density FPGAs with embedded content addressable memory functionalities for track linking and Floating Point DSPs for track fitting. First results from the commissioning of the frontend system are presented.