Lecturer (Prof. A. Heister)

Syllabus for PY482

The LHC software lecture/tutorial provides an introduction into LHC physics and the essential computational methods used for the statistical analysis of the ATLAS and CMS experiment data. The course is held at CERN and also broadcasted via the EVO video conference tool. This year the first lecture is on Tuesday, 25th, 2011.

• The time table is available as iCalendar feed from here.
• Posts for each lecture exists and will be updated as soon as the details of each lecture are fixed. Further material, e.g. for your homework, etc. is available from there as well.
• The lectures will be transmitted through the EVO video conference tool. Please go to the EVO home page to register yourself in advance to the course. You will find the virtual meeting room in the “CMS community”. The name of the meeting is: “BU/CERN internship lecture”. The password will be sent to you in a private e-mail. Make sure you test your video conference setup before you will participate. Hardware recommendations, FAQ, etc. and further information are available on the EVO page.
• Please bring your laptop to all lectures. Details of how-to register your portable computer at CERN are available on this page.
• The ROOT framework will be used in the course. Installation instructions can be found on this page.
• All material incl. slides of this course can be found here: https://physics.bu.edu/CERN-BU-UniGE/. Please use your buphy login.

Introduction to Particle Physics

Several very good sources are available on the web. You can checkout e.g. Google. An award winning interactive tour can be found here.

Outreach pages

• ATLAS
• CMS
• T2K

What is ROOT? (taken from here)

The ROOT system provides a set of OO frameworks with all the functionality needed to handle and analyze large amounts of data in a very efficient way. Having the data defined as a set of objects, specialized storage methods are used to get direct access to the separate attributes of the selected objects, without having to touch the bulk of the data. Included are histograming methods in an arbitrary number of dimensions, curve fitting, function evaluation, minimization, graphics and visualization classes to allow the easy setup of an analysis system that can query and process the data interactively or in batch mode, as well as a general parallel processing framework, PROOF, that can considerably speed up an analysis.

Thanks to the built-in CINT C++ interpreter the command language, the scripting, or macro, language and the programming language are all C++. The interpreter allows for fast prototyping of the macros since it removes the, time consuming, compile/link cycle. It also provides a good environment to learn C++. If more performance is needed the interactively developed macros can be compiled using a C++ compiler via a machine independent transparent compiler interface called ACliC.

The system has been designed in such a way that it can query its databases in parallel on clusters of workstations or many-core machines. ROOT is an open system that can be dynamically extended by linking external libraries. This makes ROOT a premier platform on which to build data acquisition, simulation and data analysis systems.

ROOT is available under the LGPL license.

How-To install ROOT

ROOT is available for various platforms. Instructions how-to install ROOT can be found here. Several operating systems are supported. We recommend to use ROOT on a UNIX based platform, e.g. LINUX or Mac OS X. In case you are using Microsoft Windows you will have to install a X-Server client, e.g. X-Win32, probably. For BU students a free license would be available from the BU IT department. For sure you will need a X-Server application if you want to use PuTTY on Microsoft Windows. PuTTY is a free Telnet/SSH client also available for Microsoft Window.