Oxford graduate students in the ATLAS control room. Image (c) CERN
The LHC provides ATLAS with 40 million collisions per second. Each collision contains 1MB of data, so we can't afford to save them all for detailed analysis.
The job of selecting the most interesting events is known as the trigger. Our group currently has responsibilities for three triggers:
- The trigger which selects invisible particles - including Dark Matter particles
- The trigger which selects jets from b-hadrons - the main decay product of Higgs boson decays
- The trigger which selects boosted tau-lepton pairs - adding sensitivity to Higgs bosons with high momentum