The second level trigger system of FAST

The Fibre Active Scintillator Target (FAST) experiment is a novel imaging particle detector currently operating in a high-intensity π+ beam at the Paul Scherrer Institute (PSI), Villigen, Switzerland. The detector is designed to perform a high precision measurement of the μ+ lifetime, in order to determine the Fermi constant, Gf, to 1 ppm precision. A dedicated second level (LV2) hardware trigger system has been developed for the experiment. It performs an online analysis of the π/μ decay chain by identifying the stopping position of each beam particle and detecting the subsequent appearance of the muon. The LV2 trigger then records the muon stop pixel and selectively triggers the Time-to-Digital Converters (TDCs) in the vicinity. A detailed description of the trigger system is presented in this paper.