JetExplorer Software

Jet finding in JetExplorer
(click for full image)

JetExplorer is a piece of software I wrote to allow exploration of jet algorithms in collider experiments in a highly visual way. Jet algorithms cluster particles according to simple mathematical rules but the resulting behaviour is often very complicated and difficult to imagine.

It was never really finished but it did let you play some nice games with jet algorithms and is worth a go. You can get it from the original JetExplorer page.

It was written in Java which caused a number of problems, most high energy physics libraries have no Java version or bindings. I ended up porting part of fastjet to Java to get it working.

More recently I have been working on a replacement, JetExplorer2, using C++ and the Qt libraries. I'm still exploring exactly what this is going to end up looking like. My hope is to make it really easy to explore visually exactly what a variety of jet algorithms and jet substructure procedures are actually doing to an event.

Voronoi diagram in JetExplorer2
(click for full image)

The code will use all the standard stuff like libHepMC so you can load events from any Monte Carlo you like and directly link to fastjet for faster jet finding. I'm planning to incorporate several of the more popular jet substructure procedures and also some experimental things like simple magnetic fields.

I don't know when I'll ever get time to do more work on this. I'll post something here as soon as it can do anything vaguely useful. There is an example video here.