Sonic screwdriver

A plotting tool for high-energy physics using Root

Goal

This tool is designed to make it easy to generate high-energy physics plots by providing the user with a clean, flexible front-end aimed to manipulate physics concepts instead of ROOT-related technical mess.

                                              +--------------+                 
                                              |              |                 
                             describe         |  Physics     |                 
                        ----------------->    |    concepts  |                 
    +---------------+                         |              | --+             
    |               |                         +--------------+   |             
    |   Particle    |                                            |     Sonic   
    |   Physicist   |                                            |  screwdriver
    |               |                         +--------------+   |             
    +---------------+                         |              | <-+             
                        <-----------------    |  Plots and   |                 
                                get           |    tables    |                 
                                              |              | <-->  ROOT      
                                              +--------------+                 

Name inspiration (warning : it doesn't work on wood)

Features

• Describe the physics : variables, datasets & process classes, cuts, regions & channels, figures, ...
• List the type of plots you want to be produced : superimposed, stacked, data/MC comparisons, 2D, ...
• Use options where you want to change the standard behavior and personalize the outputs
• Run over your datasets, automatically feeding the histograms all at once
• Ask for your plots and tables to be produced
• Browse the outputs, do actual physics

Installation

After setting up ROOT, just do :

make 

To get a quick idea of how the tool is working, you can check plotGenerationExample.cc provided in the test folder. To run it, type :

cd test && make test

Then manually browse the plots in test/plots/ or just do

make browse

It will open a TBrowser with the root files already loaded.

Usage / how-to

Pieces of documentation are provided in the HOW-TO file.

To-do list / ideas

Important :

• Documentation
• More global options to change font, line width, ... maybe add a config file to read stuff from.
• Use C++ maps to better handle the various vectors of variables/processes/regions/histos/plots
• Have an extra optional argument for datasets to be splitted in different process classes
• Rethink the way lumi is managed, more generally define weighting via a function pointer

Little improvements :

• For custom binning, option to redivide the content of the bins to simulate a fixed bin width (to keep having an interpretation in term of pdf).
• Modify the way operations between figures are made (should use actual stat formulas instead of root intermediate histos)
• Maybe possibility to link variable to vectors (of float, ints..). ...And maybe to TLorentzVector ? Not a big fan of this though.

Big stuff :

• Possibility to separate the reading from the actual plotting, ie export raw histograms and be able to import them.
• Web-based interface to generate the code ?

Eric suggestions :

• Add Chi2 or Kolmogorov test for data/MC comparison + display value on the plot
• Add 2D plot showing the evolution of correlation between two variables after lower/upper cuts
• Add data and SM yield on data/MC plot