Design and implementation of a first-level trigger system for the upgrade of the CMS detector within the Large Hadron Collider at CERN

The Large Hadron Collider (LHC) at CERN will be the world's highest energy particle accelerator for the foreseeable future, and the only facility capable of investigating some of the highest priority topics in fundamental physics. LHC operation will continue until at least 2035, with ever-increasing performance required from the accelerator complex in order to provide useful statistical reach and from the associated detectors. As such the CMS detector will require significant and comprehensive upgrades in order to maintain performance in the presence of much harsher conditions.

Milos' PhD is focussed on the design and implementation of a first-level trigger system for the upgrade of the CMS detector. The upgrade will include a replacement of the two existing endcap calorimeters with a novel high-granularity combined calorimeter. The high granularity means the new calorimeter will have many more readout channels, resulting in more than an order of magnitude higher data rate from the detector. The trigger system gives a fast decision on when to write these data to storage. The trigger algorithm for this decision will be implemented in a network of interconnected high-end FPGAs. The main issues are to develop an optimised algorithm which can fit into the available resources of the FPGAs and which can make a decision in the required time. The project will involve a combination of VHDL firmware development for the FPGAs and simulation of potential algorithms to estimate performance in terms of sensitivity to the physics processes the CMS data will measure.

Please refer to lead proposal