[Rivet-announce] Rivet 2.5.0 and YODA 1.6.2 releases

[Andy Buckley]

Dear Rivet users,

We are very pleased to announce the release of Rivet 2.5.0 (and version 
1.6.2 of the YODA histogramming package).

There are three major new developments in this Rivet version: support 
for simple & very flexible detector smearing in BSM search analyses; 
improved machinery for Lorentz boosts and in particular boosts into the 
beam particle/nucleon centre-of-mass frame; and replacement of the Boost 
C++ library by features from the C++11 language update. A few more 
details are given below.


UPGRADING

Both codes are available to download from the Rivet and YODA web-pages 
now, and we recommend them for immediate production use:

   http://rivet.hepforge.org/
   http://yoda.hepforge.org/

The "bootstrap" scripts have also been updated for these new versions: 
just follow the "Getting Started" instructions on the Rivet web page.

Note that to build these versions of Rivet and YODA, and to compile 
analyses against them, you must be using a compiler capable of building 
C++11 code. This includes GCC >= 4.8, and recent versions of LLVM/clang.


RIVET TUTORIAL AT CERN, 13 JULY

We would also like to draw your attention to the Rivet tutorial at CERN 
next week, on Wednesday 13 July: https://indico.cern.ch/event/536619/ We 
will use the new version and demonstrate some of the new features in the 
tutorial and you are very welcome to attend.


COMMENTS ON NEW FEATURES

Rivet 2.5.0 contains all the analyses from the recently released Rivet 
2.4.3, as well as the detector smearing & boosting features and various 
other improvements.

The detector smearing has been implemented by wrapping existing Rivet 
particle- and jet-finding projections in "smearing" projections. These 
can be configured either from standard LHC and CMS efficiency and 
smearing functions (based on Delphes configuration and experiment 
performance notes), or by custom ones -- even specific to each analysis! 
As usual the projection system will automatically cache any repeat 
requests for smearing, to keep the analyses CPU-efficient.


SMEARING IS JUST FOR BSM!

We'd like to stress that this smearing machinery is entirely aimed at 
easy BSM analysis preservation & recasting: we _very_ strongly encourage 
experiments to continue properly unfolding detector effects from SM, 
top, Higgs, etc. measurements rather than treating this development as 
"permission" to take a less useful short-cut! We will continue to police 
the submissions ;-)


Best wishes,
The Rivet team

-- 
Dr Andy Buckley, Lecturer / Royal Society University Research Fellow
Particle Physics Expt Group, University of Glasgow