Recent advances in ADL, CutLang and adl2tnm

Harrison B Prosper,Sezen Sekmen,Arpon Paul,Gokhan Unel,C Biscarat,C.I Rovelli,G.A Stewart,B Hegner,S Roiser,S Campana

doi:10.1051/epjconf/202125103062

Abstract

This paper presents an overview and features of an Analysis Description Language (ADL) designed for HEP data analysis. ADL is a domainspecific, declarative language that describes the physics content of an analysis in a standard and unambiguous way, independent of any computing frameworks. It also describes infrastructures that render ADL executable, namely CutLang, a direct runtime interpreter (originally also a language), and adl2tnm, a transpiler converting ADL into C++ code. In ADL, analyses are described in humanreadable plain text files, clearly separating object, variable and event selection definitions in blocks, with a syntax that includes mathematical and logical operations, comparison and optimisation operators, reducers, four-vector algebra and commonly used functions. Recent studies demonstrate that adapting the ADL approach has numerous benefits for the experimental and phenomenological HEP communities. These include facilitating the abstraction, design, optimization, visualization, validation, combination, reproduction, interpretation and overall communication of the analysis contents and long term preservation of the analyses beyond the lifetimes of experiments. Here we also discuss some of the current ADL applications in physics studies and future prospects based on static analysis and differentiable programming.

Highlights

High energy physics (HEP) experiments are collecting unprecedented amounts of data
We present the developments on such a language, called an Analysis Description Language (ADL) that can fully and unambiguously describe the complete physics algorithm of a HEP analysis in a framework-independent manner
We presented the concept and recent developments in a domain specific, declarative and framework-independent Analysis Description Language for HEP analyses

Summary

Introduction

High energy physics (HEP) experiments are collecting unprecedented amounts of data. In order to explore these data for hints of new physics, or to perform high precision measurements, physicists are designing an ever growing number of elaborate analyses. ADL, at its current state, emerged from the combination of the best ideas from two parallel efforts: One effort is LHADA (Les Houches Analysis Description Accord), a prototype language designed by a group of experimentalists and phenomenologists to methodically document and run content of LHC analyses [9,10,11]. Earlier prototype transpilers converting LHADA into code snippets that could be integrated within CheckMate [1,2,3] and Rivet [6, 7] frameworks were studied All such runtime interpreter or transpiler systems are surrounded by frameworks whose purposes become reduced to handling operations such as data input, histogramming, results output for statistical analysis, etc.

ADL overview

The CutLang interpreter and framework

Physics studies

Prospects for static analysis and differentiable programming

Conclusions and outlook