The trigger system of the ARGO-YBJ experiment

Astrophysical radiation with ground-based observatory at YangBaJing (ARGO-YBJ) is a ground-based cosmic ray detector presently under construction at the Yangbajing High Altitude Cosmic Ray Laboratory (4300 m a.s.l.), Lhasa, Tibet. The apparatus has been designed to detect air showers with an energy threshold of a few hundred GeV and it has a total active area of 6400 m². The full-coverage central carpet of 5772 m² is equipped with an array of resistive plate counters. This array is surrounded by a partially instrumented guard ring to improve the reconstruction of showers with the core falling outside the carpet. The ARGO trigger logic implements simple yet robust algorithms, based on the timing distribution of the hits and their multiplicity on the central carpet. In this paper, we describe the hardware architecture and the main features of the trigger system.