Speaker
Description
The SpinQuest experiment at Fermilab aims to perform the first Sivers function measurement on sea quarks to find evidence for non-zero orbital angular momentum of light antiquarks in the nucleon. In particular, the SpinQuest spectrometer will detect pairs of positive and negative muons from Drell-Yan production on polarized nucleons. In order to efficiently separate these events from the large muon background events from the the beam dump magnet, a highly efficient FPGA (field-programmable gate array) trigger is required. The trigger system consists of four stations of scintillator hodoscopes that are digitized and processed by FPGA based VMEbus modules. Hodoscope hit patterns are compared to predetermined sets, chosen from Monte Carlo simulations, in a tiered lookup table to generate trigger decisions. The design and current status of the FPGA trigger for the SpinQuest experiment will be presented.