Software for physics of tau lepton decay in LHC experiments

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development and integration of a C++ software interface for tau lepton decay simulations in LHC experiments, emphasizing methodology, challenges, and deployment across experiments.

Contribution

It introduces the TAUOLA C++ Interface for tau decays, detailing its development process and integration into LHC experiments, adapting to evolving standards.

Findings

Successful implementation of TAUOLA C++ Interface

Effective adaptation to experimental standards

Identification of integration challenges

Abstract

Software development in high energy physics experiments offers unique experience with rapidly changing environment and variety of different standards and frameworks that software must be adapted to. As such, regular methods of software development are hard to use as they do not take into account how greatly some of these changes influence the whole structure. The following thesis summarizes development of TAUOLA C++ Interface introducing tau decays to new event record standard. Documentation of the program is already published. That is why it is not recalled here again. We focus on the development cycle and methodology used in the project, starting from the definition of the expectations through planning and designing the abstract model and concluding with the implementation. In the last part of the paper we present installation of the software within different experiments surrounding Large Hadron Collider and the problems that emerged during this process.