Analysis Centre

The Analysis Centre of the Helmholtz Alliance supports physicists from German groups on general data analysis issues. This is done by

• providing training and education on analysis-related topics through schools, workshos and seminars;
• providing support and assistance for individual user problems;
• strengthening the collaboration between different institutes and experiments and between experiment and theory;
• carrying out own research and creating significant contributions to the data analysis project.

The Analysis Centre currently comprises three main activities, namely Monte Carlo generators, parton distribution functions, and statistics tools.

The Monte Carlo Generator group works towards providing training, support and own contributions in the field of Monte Carlo generators. For this purpose, it is building on the experience already present at DESY and is forming a network of Monte Carlo-related activities in German and other institutes. Besides organising schools and workshops and being a place for discussion, the group is working on the tuning and validation of MC models with the first LHC data, on the development of HzTool and RIVET, and on the (further) development of parton showers models and certain MC generators (CASCADE).

The activities of the Statistics Tools group comprise the development of statistics tools necessary for data analysis, the implementation of tools into software frameworks like ROOT, and the support of the community in statistics-related questions. The group is organising a series of workshops around the issues of limit determination, fitting, signal-background separation, and data corrections.

The PDF group activities build on in-house expertise in the analysis of DIS structure function data from HERA, and on precise theoretical predictions for hard scattering processes. It will assist in precision determinations of the parton luminosity at the LHC.

The objective of the SUSY/BSM Fit Working Group is to provide optimal means to fully exploit available and future data with respect to Supersymmetry and other new physics models. It is a joint effort by theorists and experimentalists. The work should put us into a position to combine data from all possible sources to either constrain new physics models and their parameters or - if there are no indications of physics beyond the Standard Model - to translate the search limits into excluded regions in theory parameter spaces.