From ATLAS-TRIUMF

Summer student work (2005): Daniel Laycock (completed his 3rd year at McMaster)

The main goal of his project was to get me started on the physics analysis side and explore/develop/test tools for a full chain analysis (primarily aimed at selecting events containing dileptons, jets and missing energy). He worked on various things:

1) Athena machinery

   - development of a full chain analysis
   - Job option files templates and configurations
   - Analysis skeleton code development
   - ROOT analysis code & macros

  The skeleton code is meant to be as generic as possible
  in order  to minimize the access frequency to AOD. Access to
  AOD information is very slow (as of summer 2005), so for efficiency 
  most of the analysis algorithm is done at the ROOT level.

2) Validation

  - In order to validate the machinery we did reproduce results 
    obtained by others to search for H->WW and H->tautau). Atlfast was used
    for the signal and the backgrounds. A comparison using fully simulated
    samples was also performed, using samples from the Rome workshop.
  

3) Further work /analysis

  - Since we verified that our machinery works, we started developing 
    our own analysis techniques. We are trying few things with the fast
    simulation, then we will switch to the full simulation, when all 
    samples are available (including various higgs masses, etc.). 
    Pileup, etc., still need to be explored.

All of his work results (including his summer report) can be found in a tarball. Note that his report is NOT on how to run Athena. To use his machinery a basic knowledge of Athena is required (by following some classical Athena tutorials).

Reda