The STAR experiment

First things first. I went to http://www2.lns.mit.edu/compserv/cms-acctappl.html and applied for a local account. The welcome message contained a link to the CMSAF User Guide found on this TWiki page.

AFS isn’t available on CMSAF, so I started a local tree at /osg/app/star/afs_rhic and began to copy over stuff. Here’s a list of what I copied so far (nodes are running SL 4.4):

I copied these precompiled libraries over instead of building them myself because of a tricky problem with the interactive nodes’ configuration. The main gateway node is a 64-bit machine, so regular attempts at compilation produce 64-bit libraries that we can’t use. CMSAF has a node reserved for 32-bit builds, but it’s running SL 3.0.5. We’re still working on a proper resolution of that problem. Perhaps we can force cons to do 32-bit compilations.

The environment scripts are working, although I had to add more hacks than I thought were necessary. I only changed the following files:

1. ~/.login
2. ~/.cshrc
3. $GROUP_DIR/site_post_setup.csh

It doesn’t seem possible to change the default login shell (chsh and ypchsh both fail), so when you login you need to type “tcsh” to get a working STAR environment (after copying my .login and .cshrc to your home directory, of course).

Basic interactive tests look good, and I’ve got a SUMS configuration that will do local job submissions to the Condor system (that’s a topic for another post). DB calls use the MIT database mirror. I think that’s all for now.

MIT’s CMS Analysis Facility is a large Tier-2 computing center built for CMS user analyses. We’re looking into the viability of using it for STAR computing.

Here are the plots from 5000 gamma events, with a seed tower energy cutoff of 1 GeV and a cluster energy cutoff of 4 GeV.  The first page has on the upper left total cluster energy, on the upper

See the below pdf.  This was made from 5000 piminus events.  The error bars were calculated from the formula delta-eff=sqrt(B*C/(B+C)^3), where B is the number of accepted tracks and C the n

See the pdfs below.  The second page has reconstruction efficiencies.  Note that a cut of pt>5 GeV was imposed on the reconstructed tracks to try to reduce the impact of secondary particl

We've generated the following MC datasets, all located in /star/institutions/mit/corliss/magic_single_particle/

See the pdfs attached below, each covering 1000 events of the given particle type in the given detector.  Page 1 has the standard MC QA plots, page 2 has plots for MC primary tracks only, page 3

balewski.1. Miro_PCBoard.pdf [PDF, 54.29 KB] May 15 2009 18:07:57.
balewski.2. Miro-apv_brd_pcb.pdf [PDF, 176.16 KB] May 15 2009 18:15:13.
balewski.3. 2008-10-FGT-DNPv1.pdf [PDF, 5.25 MB] May 15 2009 18:14:40.

gvisser.1. Slides from Miro, for FGT phone meeting, friday 2/8/2008 [PDF, 349.33 KB] May 15 2009 18:08:17.
gvisser.2. FGT & SSD electrical services materials budget - PRELIMINARY [VND.MS-EXCEL, 21 KB] May 15 2009 18:04:45.
gvisser.3. First quote for aluminum-based cable for ALL FGT SERVICES - MAX 7.24mm OD - technical details may be changed still [PDF, 36.83 KB] May 15 2009 18:07:39.
gvisser.4. [from Doug] Draka # HTC-50-1-1, 5kVdc cable (CERN spec) [PDF, 79.46 KB] May 15 2009 18:11:46.

miro.1. M_brd Quote Proto.pdf [PDF, 32.24 KB] May 15 2009 18:08:05.
miro.2. apv_board_doc.pdf [PDF, 67.31 KB] May 15 2009 18:22:36.
miro.3. apv_board_pcb.pdf [PDF, 112.81 KB] May 15 2009 18:17:32.
miro.4. sig_board_doc.pdf [PDF, 49.27 KB] May 15 2009 18:22:38.
miro.5. sig_board_pcb.pdf [PDF, 53.45 KB] May 15 2009 18:06:49.
miro.6. mechtest_pcb.pdf [PDF, 38.23 KB] May 15 2009 18:07:01.
miro.7. mechtest_doc.pdf [PDF, 86.36 KB] May 15 2009 18:03:40.
miro.8. mechtest_quote.pdf [PDF, 62.77 KB] May 15 2009 18:03:29.
miro.9. mechtrim_pcb.pdf [PDF, 107.18 KB] May 15 2009 18:11:34.
miro.10. pwr_board_pcb.pdf [PDF, 34.17 KB] May 15 2009 18:06:57.

pagebs.1. VertexPosition_mit0001_33_4000evts.jpg [JPEG, 43.64 KB] May 15 2009 18:06:30.
pagebs.2. OPcountsQCD.png [PNG, 13.65 KB] May 15 2009 18:15:29.
pagebs.3. OPcountsW.png [PNG, 17.83 KB] May 15 2009 18:04:16.
pagebs.4. ETspectrumQCD.png [PNG, 16.2 KB] May 15 2009 18:08:59.
pagebs.5. ETspectrumW.png [PNG, 17.87 KB] May 15 2009 18:15:36.
pagebs.6. IsoET01.png [PNG, 13.64 KB] May 15 2009 18:12:55.
pagebs.7. IsoET07.png [PNG, 13.88 KB] May 15 2009 18:14:05.
pagebs.8. TrigEToverIsoET01.png [PNG, 16.89 KB] May 15 2009 18:05:31.
pagebs.9. TrigEToverIsoET07.png [PNG, 17.61 KB] May 15 2009 18:10:40.
pagebs.10. TrigOverIso01.png [PNG, 16.4 KB] May 15 2009 18:07:03.
pagebs.11. TrigOverIso026.png [PNG, 15.03 KB] May 15 2009 18:21:17.
pagebs.12. TrigOverIso07.png [PNG, 16.88 KB] May 15 2009 18:21:22.
pagebs.13. geantAccessSample.txt [PLAIN, 916 bytes] May 15 2009 18:07:02.
pagebs.14. setC3detectedSpectra.png [PNG, 12.8 KB] May 15 2009 18:04:35.
pagebs.15. setC3thrownSpectra.png [PNG, 13.45 KB] May 15 2009 18:21:19.
pagebs.16. Abstract10-08V1.0.pdf [PDF, 18.53 KB] May 15 2009 18:04:45.
pagebs.17. v4.0_FinalSpectra.png [PNG, 13.65 KB] May 15 2009 18:17:35.
pagebs.18. Abstract10-08V1.3.pdf [PDF, 19.61 KB] May 15 2009 18:04:19.

wwjacobs.1. eemc_trigger_patches_annotated.pdf [PDF, 988.89 KB] May 15 2009 18:04:16.
wwjacobs.2. BPMT_BPRS 003.jpg [JPEG, 1.04 MB] May 15 2009 18:06:51.
wwjacobs.3. eemc_swingarm.pdf [PDF, 61.82 KB] May 15 2009 18:03:46.

wzhang.1. Sunset.jpg [JPEG, 69.52 KB] May 15 2009 18:04:49.
wzhang.2. disk123.gif [GIF, 19.86 KB] June 08 2009 14:04:09.
wzhang.3. backFgtHit.gif [GIF, 30.89 KB] June 08 2009 14:06:15.

this is a test entry
don't pay too much attention to it
here's another line
and another
not less than 5, Jan commands
so I do 6
 

I plot the nSigmaPion distributions for the 859 ppProduction and ppProductionMinBias runs passing 2005 jet QA. Tracks included in each histogram passed the following cuts:

• pT > 2.0
• |eta| < 1.0
• |dcaG| < 1.0
• nFitPoints > 25

Here’s a summary of the means from each run:

I’ve also attached a PDF of the run-by-run plots at the bottom of the page (pid-stability.pdf). The group of runs around index 800 correspond to fill 7305 (highlighted in red on page 53 of the pid-stability PDF), and the large jump around index 95 coincides with the beginning of fill 7048.

I’m not so concerned about the latter group, as fills 7048 and 7055 were already excluded from analysis by the RHIC Polarimetry group. I am wondering, though, if it’s safe to analyze fill 7305. I tried the triple-Gaussian fit for data from this fill, which results in a 0.7 sigma offset for the pions. The Chi2/dof is certainly good enough:

I went ahead and did these fits for every fill in my analysis and posted the results at the bottom of the page (pid-by-fill.pdf). The fit parameters were configured as

I’m a little surprised at the fit results for these fills (i.e. pion means are often around -0.2 or lower), but I’m no expert when it comes to this stuff. Here’s a summary plot of means for the pion Gaussians in each of the fill-by-fill fits:

Summary

nSigmaPion distributions are well-described in all cases by a triple-Gaussian fit, and are generally stable within a given RHIC fill. A few fills have distributions which appear to be shifted relative to the remainder of the dataset, in particular F7305.

Update 2008-02-05

I decided to change the PID selection window in my analysis to use the results of these fill-by-fill fits. Now, instead of using a fixed [-1,2] window in nSigmaPion, I center the window on my calculated pion mean for that fill, and the width of the window is normalized by the width of the pion Gaussian. The overall effect is hardly noticeable: pion identification efficiency (based on these fits) improves by 0.6%, and background p/K/e contamination drops by an even smaller amount. The actual numbers using my final runlist are

Update 2008-03-07

I had been using the RunLog_onl DB to get fill/run mappings. I believe some entries in this database are incorrect; for more information, see this HN post. I just updated the results on this page to reflect what I now believe to be the correct mappings for fills 7127, 7128, 7129, 7134, 7136, and 7138.