Implementation and performance of the seeded reconstruction for the ATLAS event filter

ATLAS is one of the four major Large Hadron Collider (LHC) experiments that will start data taking in 2007. It is designed to cover a wide range of physics topics. The ATLAS trigger system has to be able to reduce an initial 40 MHz event rate, corresponding to an average of 23 proton-proton inelastic interactions per every 25 ns bunch crossing, to 200 Hz admissible by the Data Acquisition System. The ATLAS trigger is divided in three different levels. The first one provides a signal describing an event signature using dedicated custom hardware. This signature must be confirmed by the High Level Trigger (HLT) which using commercial computing farms performs an event reconstruction by running a sequence of algorithms. The validity of a signature is checked after every algorithm execution. A main characteristic of the ATLAS HLT is that only the data in a certain window around the position flagged by the first level trigger are analyzed. In this work, the performance of one sequence that runs at the Event Filter level (third level) is demonstrated. The goal of this sequence is to reconstruct and identify high transverse momentum electrons by performing cluster reconstruction at the electromagnetic calorimeter, track reconstruction at the Inner Detector, and cluster track matching.