The Next Generation Trigger Project at CERN

The Next Generation Triggers project (NextGen in short) is a five-year collaboration across ATLAS and CMS (with contributions from LHCb and ALICE) and the Experimental Physics, Theoretical Physics, and Information Technology Departments of CERN to research and develop new ideas and technologies for the experiment trigger systems for HL-LHC and beyond. The project is funded by the Eric and Wendy Schmidt Fund for Strategic Innovation. After more than a year of preparation in 2022-2023, the project started in January 2024. It involves the effort of more than 100 researchers and engineers over its five-year duration to work on four interacting areas: (1) online data processing, modern computing architectures, novel algorithmic concepts, machine learning and the direct interplay of experimental approaches and theory simulation; (2) enhancing the ATLAS trigger and data acquisition to focus on improved and accelerated filtering and exotic signature detection; (3) rethinking the CMS real-time data processing to design a novel AI-powered real-time processing workflow to analyze every single collision produced in the LHC; and (4) designing novel education and training programmes to support the experiment research plans.