Programming Languages used in Experimental Particle Physics
Details
[Note: Moved from May 3rd to October 4th]
Presenter: Gordon Watts, particle physicist and University of Washington physics professor
Experimental Particle Physics runs some of the largest laboratories in the world, including CERN, located in Geneva Switzerland. The research at the experiments there have lead to major discoveries like that of the Higgs Boson in 2012. It is possible to view the analysis part of the research as a large computer science problem. I'll review some context and discuss solving this problem from a programming languages point of view. Initially this field was heavily FORTRAN, and has now moved onto C++ and Python. Other, smaller boutique languages have started to crop up, including ones that are homegrown. I will discuss a smattering of them, like Histogrammar (http://histogrammar.org/), PlotLingo (https://plotlingo.codeplex.com/), and even bolt-ons to a general purpose language like C# (https://github.com/gordonwatts/LINQtoROOT), as well as some other more esoteric languages.