Author: Sophia Andaloro ([email protected])
In collaboration with DANCE EDU
- Who am I: PhD student @ Rice U. working on XENONnT, Stockpile Stewardship with the NNSA, and improving our rare event searches! I'm a big fan of ML for particle physics, and optimizing code for large-data experiments like XENON and others. I also work on NEST (nestpy, specifically), should you have questions on that!
- Date of Creation: December 1, 2020
- Why I made this repo: As a second-year PhD, I knew the whole shpiel on DM detection, limit plots, modeling signals etc. But jumping from just knowing, to doing, I had a knowledge gap. This inspired me to help others fill similar gaps efficiently, in a public repo where we can all contribute to better materials for starting out with these basic calculations!
- What this contains: As of now, very bare-bones, but the idea is that this will some day flourish to contain many exploratory notebooks that work from first-principles (importing just scipy and numpy, for instance) to physics observables, like WIMP rates!
- Special Thanks: To those that make their similar code public for me to use as helpful starting points, and to Jelle Aalbers for being the first and greatest example I had as a starting grad student in how important didactic aims like this are to the future success of physics.
TL;DR: If you're looking to utilize (or better yet, contribute to) basic to advanced tutorials in DM and other rare-event detection, look no further.
So you're ready to begin! You can clone, branch and PR with your improvements, and help turn this into something great! ...Or if you want to just start on a remote machine to ease the computational learning curve, you can do that too! Check out our [binder](https://mybinder.org/v2/gh/sophiaandaloro/tutorials/HEAD) . (no installation, not even python, NOTHING needed!)
You probably fall in 3 categories if you've reached this repo:
- You're a seasoned physicist (or educator!) who knows all this stuff already (or think you do...) Welcome!! You're just what we need! Please reach out via email to me (and/or our lead investigator, Chris Tunnell ([email protected]) to get started on recruiting your own students to help the cause! So far, I am the only one who's been able to make these tutorials, but I also need lots of help.
- You're just starting out in learning these things, and your advisor told you to look here. WELCOME!! Particle physics and rare-event searches rock. You're going to love it. You're just what we need, too! Get started on these tutorials, email me (or better yet, Slack me if you can) with questions. These tutorials were made for you. Even as a second year, I had to learn all of this stuff to make these, so don't feel alone! And remember, we're all new to this, so if you notice mistakes or things I missed, CALL ME OUT ON IT! Make a new branch or fork, improve my work, and make a PR (instructions below or google if you need more help)
- Finally, you might be like me, a middle-of-the-road student who realized too late, "oh crap no one ever told me to make these plots and now I have no idea beyond waving my hands how we get a rate limit!! If only there was someone who's boiled down papers and theses to help me! (Ignore my self-promotion...haha) Lucky for you, I made this public! But if like me, you're a student who's been searching for these things for a while I have an important request for you, and that goes for everyone:
PLEASE. PLEASE. Don't simply download the notebooks, run them, share with others internally, and improve them for yourselves.
I'm going out on a limb here, I spent a LOT of time synthesizing all this so that we can learn from each other.
For the sake of other students, and yourself, (and me), please, pay it forward, credit this where it's due (always good practice,)
and when you find room for improvement, please make a PR and share back with me.
The esoteric nature of these types of calculations can only be stopped once we all decide to spend those extra few minutes pushing remotely once we're done improving code.
Ok enough lecturing! Thank you for reading and helping me out!!
You're likely wondering, "cool, but where's the tutorial to do (some cool physics thing)??" and that is the perfect segue for you to make a tutorial and add here, or reach out to collaborate!
- Either fork or branch this repo, and add a folder if you have more than one file, and/or a notebook (if very simple)
- Document in your code AND the PR what your notebook/code does, why you made it, your name, and ways it could be improved.
- If you are making your own folder, add a readme like this with the description of what your tutorial does and how people can run it.
- Email/Slack me with questions, or if I forget to review your PR.