A high mass trigger for the E864 experiment at the AGS accelerator

The E864 experiment at the AGS is designed to carry out high sensitivity searches for a variety of possible new particles using relativistic heavy ion Au beams on Pb and Pt targets. In order to reach the desired sensitivities, a level-2 “late energy” trigger was built to select events in which a heavy particle is detected in a hadronic calorimeter with deposited energy and time-of-flight from the target exceeding preset values. The physics motivation for the trigger is discussed and and details of its hardware and software design are given. Performance results from recent E864 data taking runs are presented.