Analysis Description Languages for the LHC

TL;DR

This paper discusses the development of analysis description languages for the LHC, aiming to standardize and clarify analysis descriptions to improve preservation, communication, and collaboration across the physics community.

Contribution

It introduces the concept of analysis description languages and summarizes ongoing efforts to develop tools for LHC analyses, enhancing analysis transparency and reproducibility.

Findings

Analysis description languages enable unambiguous analysis descriptions.

They facilitate analysis preservation and communication.

Current efforts are progressing in developing these languages and tools.

Abstract

An analysis description language is a domain specific language capable of describing the contents of an LHC analysis in a standard and unambiguous way, independent of any computing framework. It is designed for use by anyone with an interest in, and knowledge of, LHC physics, i.e., experimentalists, phenomenologists and other enthusiasts. Adopting analysis description languages would bring numerous benefits for the LHC experimental and phenomenological communities ranging from analysis preservation beyond the lifetimes of experiments or analysis software to facilitating the abstraction, design, visualization, validation, combination, reproduction, interpretation and overall communication of the analysis contents. Here, we introduce the analysis description language concept and summarize the current efforts ongoing to develop such languages and tools to use them in LHC analyses.