Rivet tutorial

Tuesday 9 Aug 2011, 10:00 → 16:00 Europe/Zurich

TH Theory Conference Room (CERN)

Andy Buckley (High Energy Physics Group-College of Science and Engineering-Un)

Rivet is a software toolkit for data analysis of MC event generator samples, which provides tools (jet algorithms, event shapes, etc.) to make analysis-writing easy and generator-independent, and a large (100+) collection of MC versions of published experimental analyses. LHC experimentalists are encouraged to write Rivet analyses corresponding to their data analyses, and many phenomenologists have found Rivet a convenient way to do studies, both for Standard Model and BSM physics, and for MC comparisons and validation, see e.g. the LPCC http://mcplots.cern.ch web site. 
This tutorial will cover the essentials of using Rivet, from browsing and running existing analyses to writing new ones:
- Intro: design, behaviour and philosophy
- Listing analyses and viewing metadata
- Running built-in analyses
- Plotting and analysing output histograms
- Analysis writing: analysis plugins and calculating observables
- Writing and running a MC-only analysis
- Writing and running a data-based analysis

The tutorial will be hands-on and laptop-based. primarily using the CERN lxplus system. A virtual machine image will be provided for those without lxplus accounts: if you don't have an lxplus account, you will need to pre-install this before the tutorial. The VM image can be downloaded from http://www.hepforge.org/archive/professor/RivetProfessor-1.0.tar.bz2 (750MB) and used with the VirtualBox VM engine.
If you are interested in working through the tutorial using a particular event generator (Herwig++, Pythia 8, Sherpa, PYTHIA 6), please let us know in advance. No specific prior knowledge is needed, but an awareness of event generation issues will help. Further information can be found on the Rivet web page: http://projects.hepforge.org/rivet/

The tutorial will start at 10am CERN time. We will start with an introduction to using the analyses distributed with Rivet to analyse MC generator event properties and to use the Rivet plotting and comparison tools. Before lunchtime there will be an exercise to write and run a simple analysis.

The afternoon session will introduce the Rivet projection system in more detail, particularly jet and vector boson reconstruction, and involve a more realistic analysis-writing exercise. If you have an analysis that you particularly want to implement in Rivet, this is a good opportunity to ask for advice and hands-on help with the analysis implementation.

The meeting will be broadcast via EVO, see this page for the details on the day of the meeting.
Information on accommodation, access to CERN and laptop registration is available from http://lpcc.web.cern.ch/LPCC/index.php?page=visit

10:00 → 10:30 Coffee

10:30 → 12:30 Rivet I: running Rivet, and simple analysis writing

Speakers: Andy Buckley (High Energy Physics Group-College of Science and Engineering-Un), Hendrik Hoeth (Durham University)

Slides rivet-tutorial.pdf

Video in CDS Video in CDS

12:30 → 14:00 Lunch

14:00 → 16:00 Rivet II: Writing real-world analyses, and troubleshooting session

Speakers: Andy Buckley (High Energy Physics Group-College of Science and Engineering-Un), Hendrik Hoeth (Durham University)

Video in CDS Video in CDS