Abstract
In a colliding beam accelerator such as Fermilab or the Superconducting Supercollider (SSC) protons, or antiprotons, collide at a rate between 10(5) (Fermilab) and 10(8) (SSC) collisions per second. In real time experimentalists have to select those events which are candidates for exploring the limit of known phenomena at a much lower rate, 1-100 per second, for recording on permanent media. The rate of events from new physics sources is expected to be much lower, as low as a few per year. This is a severe problem in pattern recognition: with an input data stream of up to 10(15) potential bits per second in its images, we have to pick out those images that are potentially interesting in real time at a discrimination level of 1 part in 10(6), with a known efficiency. I will describe the overall filtering strategies and the custom hardware to do this event selection (a.k.a. pattern recognition).
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