The COMPASS trigger system for muon scattering

Abstract The trigger system of the COMPASS experiment at the CERN polarized muon beam is presented. It detects muon scattering events on (polarized) nucleons with a relative energy loss exceeding a selectable value y min independent of the four-momentum transfer. The requirement of a minimum energy deposit in a hadron calorimeter rejects background events like scattering on electrons, elastic and quasi-elastic radiative events as well as events from beam halo tracks. The trigger system which can be considered as a tagger for quasi-real photon events is now, along with larger trigger hodoscope system for deep inelastic scattering events, in regular use for the measurement of the gluon polarisation Δ G / G .