The CMS Level-1 electron and photon trigger: For Run II of LHC

The Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) employs a sophisticated two-level online triggering system that has a rejection factor of up to 10 ⁵ . Since the beginning of Run II of LHC, the conditions that CMS operates in have become increasingly challenging. The centre-of-mass energy is now 13 TeV and the instantaneous luminosity currently peaks at 1.5 ×10 ³⁴ cm ^-2 s ^-1 . In order to keep low physics thresholds and to trigger efficiently in such conditions, the CMS trigger system has been upgraded. A new trigger architecture, the Time Multiplexed Trigger (TMT) has been introduced which allows the full granularity of the calorimeters to be exploited at the first level of the online trigger. The new trigger has also benefited immensely from technological improvements in hardware. Sophisticated algorithms, developed to fully exploit the advantages provided by the new hardware architecture, have been implemented. The new trigger system started taking physics data in 2016 following a commissioning period in 2015, and since then has performed extremely well. The hardware and firmware developments, electron and photon algorithms together with their performance in challenging 2016 conditions is presented.