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Asked by mrjordiec to Ben, Jony, Katharine, Mark, Peter on 14 Nov 2011.
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Jony Hudson answered on 12 Nov 2011:
I use quite a lot of different things. Probably the thing I use most often is Mathematica, which is a bit like a swiss-army knife, in that it’s pretty good for solving lots of different kind of maths and physics problems. And it makes really nice graphs too.
Other than that I use a bit of visual studio for programming, powerpoint for lectures and stuff, latex for writing papers and notes, and the usual stuff for web and email.
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Mark Basham answered on 13 Nov 2011:
Like Jony, I use Microsoft office (power-point, word, excel, etc) for most of my documents/presentations etc. and Firefox for the web.
But most of my job is writing software and for that i mainly use Eclipse, which is a piece of software to help writing Java code. I also use our own software to write scientific programs in Python which is an excellent programming language for scientific problems. In fact a random piece of trivia is that it was a Python program that identified the recent supernova in 2011.
Anyhow some links to the projects are below if you would like to know more 🙂
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Ben Still answered on 14 Nov 2011:
Aside from the usual Office stuff for presentations etc we tend to use specialised software written by and for particle physicists. To simulate the way out particle detectors see particles we use a piece of software called GEANT. To analyse the massive amounts of data we have a piece of software call ROOT which allows us to do fancy things with the data. Aside from this we also use software that we have written ourselves.
iTunes is another essential piece of software to help while I program.
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Katharine Schofield answered on 14 Nov 2011:
Well, I’m not in active research any more so in my job now I’m mainly just using word/excel/outlook/powerpoint.
When I was doing my PhD, like Ben I used things like ROOT and GEANT. The main programming language was C++. One thing I did really like was a typesetting program called LaTeX, it made all my written work look soooo professional and all the equations were set out so neatly. Once you got used to it, it was great.
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Peter Williams answered on 14 Nov 2011:
To design and model particle accelerators i use code written by physicists (sometimes me). If you ask a computer scientist about code written by physicists, they will usually say lots of rude words.
ELEGANT (electron generation and tracking) is the one i use most. It’s written in C by the staff of the Advanced Photon Source at Argonne National Lab, near Chicago.
ASTRA (a space-charge tracking algorithm) is another favourite – this one comes from DESY (Deutsches Elektronen Synchrotron) lab in Hamburg and was developed for the International Linear Collider project.
MAD (methodical accelerator design) is also one i use a lot. This comes from CERN near Geneva and was originally developed to design the SPS (super proton synchrotron – work done on this machine got the Nobel for the discovery of the W and Z particles in the 1980’s)
There are many others – but these are the ones i use most.Much of the time i use these in conjunction with Mathematica because, as Jony says, it’s very versatile. I can use it to post-process data from the physics codes in nice ways.
On the hardware side, I use the Grid – this is a network of high performance clusters that i can access in a (supposedly) transparent way. I submit batch jobs to this and it sends them off to a really fast machine somewhere. Then the data comes back to you when it’s done. For some things it’s invaluable, for others less so. I’m going to try out some GPU based computing in the near future.
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