RE: Back from HiveFest - Combine and conquer (new phenomena at particle colliders)

Welcome back. Sounds like Hivefest was fun. Every picture and report I read from participants in that event is positive. Everyone seems to have had a great experience.

Thanks! Yes, HiveFest was really fun. I am now capable to associate a real face with many usernames. This is always something great when it can be done. That reminds me my early days on social media platforms (like mIRC in the 1990s or Parano in the 2000s).

Hope you are feeling well. It is relaxing, and taxing, to travel.

This trip actually allowed me to change my mind quite significantly, which was overdue (a lot of demanding personal issues at the moment). I am now feeling much more relaxed, which is obviously a good thing.

The first thing I noted was the illustration of the trigger mechanism: it looks so unsophisticated. Reminds me of a circuit board in an electronics kit. And yet, so much of the data you analyze depends on the 'decisions' of that trigger.

This is however what most online triggers are: a piece of electronics deciding automatically what to do with what is seen in the detector.

You publish your paper in an open access journal, and yet there is information that cannot be shared. Why? Because the results of these studies could conceivably be used in weapons development?

it has nothing to do with weapons or those things. Remember it is fundamental science (so no immediate application).

The availability of experimental results for re-use is a hot topic for many years., and is actually very important. The main reason for not having everything public is a basic one.

First, anything that gets public takes time. Checks are required about the sanity of the information, its format, etc. It must get a collaboration stamp at the end, so that it is all good to become public (having information used in a computer code is different from having it ready to be shared with the world, and re-used).

What gets public is the analysis itself, its description, the results (the numbers extracted from data once the analysis is run) and the comparison with predictions for interpretations in some theoretical framework. All of this ends in an open-access scientific article. Raw data become public only a few years later. The experimental collaborations have the privilege to have priority on their data for what concerns their analysis.

In the meantime, we (theorists) started to work less than a decade ago on re-interpretation platforms allowing for an approximate re-interpretation of the experimental results (in any theory framework) on the basis of what was available from the experimental publications. It turned out that this was not easy because a lot of information was missing, or not properly documented. Reading a publication and producing a computer code mimicking it are two very different tasks... ;)

We therefore discussed a lot with the collaborations to solve this issue, and the material became better and better with time. It is still not easy today to add a new analysis to a re-interpretation framework (validation is often difficult), but things are much better than 10 years ago.

Now for what concerns the missing correlations to allow us to have better re-interpretations, we are asking for them for some time now, but they were not priority number one back in the days. Once again, the move to make them public is on-going, but it takes time. Baby step by baby step, somehow.

Having this becoming systematic is challenging in the sense that at the end, the last push needed to make all the work re-usable is poorly rewarded for a young experimenter, so that the interest stays mild. The added value on the CV is probably close to negligible, so that people prefer to move with a fresh and new analysis when one is finished (instead of taking the time to make it fully re-usable).

To make a long story short: things are moving in the right direction, but this takes time. I am hopeful for the future :)

PS: I am quite sure my answer will trigger other questions from you. Don't hesitate, this is fine ;)