The multilevel trigger system of the DIRAC experiment at CERN is presented.
It includes a fast first level trigger as well as various trigger processors to
select events with a pair of pions having a low relative momentum typical of
the physical process under study. One of these processors employs the drift
chamber data, another one is based on a neural network algorithm and the others
use various hit-map detector correlations. Two versions of the trigger system
used at different stages of the experiment are described. The complete system
reduces the event rate by a factor of 1000, with efficiency ≥95% of
detecting the events in the relative momentum range of interest.Comment: 21 pages, 11 figure