I am involved in and started several software projects. I believe that software projects should be open source so that the whole community can profit from it. I do my best to make projects public at an early stage and to provide documentation and support for others.
A new modular framework for a Monte Carlo simulation of radio neutrino detectors in dense media. I initiated this project as a new joint simulation framework for the ARIANNA and ARA collaboration. It contains all functionality to
- generate neutrino interactions in the ice
- calculate the Askaryan radio signal from the induces particle shower
- propagating the radio signal through the ice to the detector, and
- to simulate the detector response and trigger.
C. Glaser et al., “NuRadioMC: Simulating the radio emission of neutrinos from interaction to detector”, European Physics Journal C 80, 77 (2020), doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-020-7612-8, arXiv:1906.01670
A modular Python based reconstruction framework for radio detectors of high energy neutrinos (and cosmic rays). I started this project at UCI together with Anna Nelles with the focus to reconstruct cosmic rays measured by the ARIANNA detector. It evolved to a flexible framework for the detector simulation and reconstruction suitable for any neutrino radio detector.
NuRadioReco is used by the ARIANNA and RNO-G collaborations for data analyses as well as for simulation studies. Many students implement their work as NuRadioReco modules which directly makes their work available open-source to the radio community and thereby accelerates progress.
The development of NuRadioReco was integrated into NuRadioMC. See github.com/nu-radio/NuRadioMC/ or the NuRadioReco paper for more details.
C. Glaser et al., “NuRadioReco: A reconstruction framework for radio neutrino detectors”, European Physics Journal C 79: 464 (2019), doi:10.1140/epjc/s10052-019-6971-5, arXiv:1903.07023
Radiotools
A tool package with everything* a physicist working on radio detection of neutrinos or cosmic rays needs. I started this project during my PhD thesis as a collection of tools that I need for my daily work. Especially grad students spend most of their time programming and the wheel is often reinvented again and again. Therefore, I wanted to make my tool package public so that students can focus on doing physics and not on implementing error prone coordinate transformations or on figuring out how to interface CoREAS (to just name two examples). The radiotools package is constantly being developed and contains contributions from colleagues (please contact me if you can/want to contribute).
The VISPA Project, provides a web-based graphical front‐end to infrastructures. You can develop algorithms and perform data analyses in your web browser:
- get example analyses, access experimental data
- write your own algorithms, benefit from software libraries
- visualize your results
During my time at RWTH Aachen University I was part of this visionary project to bring physics analysis to the web browser. This allows for easy access to computing resources and removes the hurdle of time-consuming software installations on local computers. Many Bachelor and Master students have been profiting from this system since. Although it was developed with the focus on leading edge research, it is also a great tool for outreach, e.g. for public event displays or analysis of public data of the Pierre Auger Observatory, and for teaching.
An analytic description of the radio emission of air showers based on its emission mechanisms. To complement my work on a precise analytic parametrization of the radio signal distribution of cosmic rays, I provided a reference implementation in Python.
Offline is the reconstruction framework of the Pierre Auger Collaboration. For many years I made major contributions to the ‘radio’ part of Offline that allows to reconstruct the cosmic-ray properties such as incoming direction, energy and mass. I participated in and organized several ‘Offline workshops’ to improve the software. Offline is the basis of all analyses of the Auger Engeneering Radio Array (AERA). Upon request it is shared with others and is currently also used by the Tunka-Rex cosmic-ray radio detector in Sibiria.
CoREAS HDF converter
This tool converts the standard CoREAS output into an easy accessible HDF5 based data format and calculates commonly used high-level quantities. CoREAS is the radio extension of the CORSIKA air shower simulation code, developed by Tim Huege and the de-facto standard to calculate the radio emission from air showers. The hdf5 converter preprocesses the CoREAS output so that it can directly be used for high-level analyses (e.g. here and here). Starting from Python scripts that I got from the LOFAR collaboration, I first converted the output to the Python pickle format and later changed it to the more general HDF5 format. This tool is now part of the official CoREAS/CORSIKA release. Try it out, it will save you a lot of time!