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Week Three

Learning the “real” software – DOGS, ROOT, and GEANT-4

Alex George

Monday, June 9, 2008—

As I had already finished my code, there was no urgency to my work today. I began to experiment with the program “root,” which would be used to analyze and make histograms of the data from my code. This was slow going – there is no “root for dummies” textbook as I found out, but I was eventually able to use root’s command-line interface to make a histogram of the output from a random number generator.

Tuesday, June 10, 2008—

I continued to learn more about ROOT – I now wanted to run a program in C++ and make histograms of that data, rather than inputting the entire c++ program through the command-line interface. There were all manner of compatibility problems here that I had to learn about, and it didn’t help that the program that I had written in C++ did not behave as I expected it to. Nonetheless, I produced a very high-quality histogram of the random numbers that the c++ program had assembled, and plotted 500,000 data points on it.

Wednesday, June 11, 2008—

We spent the morning trying to get DOGS and GEANT-4 installed and working, and were successful to a point (installations and compilations on LINUX-based systems are very complicated.) There was some error that I do not fully understand, but DOGS and GEANT-4 are still not working. All four of us continued to study root as we awaited further instructions.

Ethics class today!

Thursday, June 12, 2008 –

In the late-night of Wednesday and the early morning of Thursday, June 6, a “large” tornado touched down on campus, causing $22,000,000 of damage on campus. The physics building was one of the many buildings that sustained significant damage as a result of the storm. No injuries were reported on campus, but 80% of nearby Chapman, KS was completely destroyed. The same series of storms caused the death of four boy scouts and injury of over twenty more in Iowa; it also caused complete devastation at the University of Iowa campus.

Cardwell Hall was closed due to storm cleanup efforts. We were asked to cover a few optics tables to prevent them from further damage (since the windows had been broken and were now exposed to the elements), but no further work on our projects was attained.

Friday, June 13, 2008 —

Cardwell reopened at 9:00 AM, but a power outage affected the building within an hour of reopening. No further work was done.