Recent advances in ADL, CutLang and adl2tnm

TL;DR

This paper reviews the development and features of an Analysis Description Language (ADL) for high-energy physics data analysis, emphasizing its standardization, interpretability, and potential for enhancing analysis communication and preservation.

Contribution

It introduces ADL, a domain-specific language for HEP analysis, and describes tools like CutLang and adl2tnm that make ADL executable and translatable into C++.

Findings

ADL facilitates analysis abstraction, design, and validation.

ADL improves analysis reproducibility and communication.

ADL supports long-term preservation of analysis workflows.

Abstract

This paper presents an overview and features of an Analysis Description Language (ADL) designed for HEP data analysis. ADL is a domain specific, declarative language that describes the physics content of an analysis in a standard and unambiguous way, independent of any computing frameworks. It also describes infrastructures that render ADL executable, namely CutLang, a direct runtime interpreter (originally also a language), and adl2tnm, a transpiler converting ADL into C++ code. In ADL, analyses are described in human readable plain text files, clearly separating object, variable and event selection definitions in blocks, with a syntax that includes mathematical and logical operations, comparison and optimisation operators, reducers, four-vector algebra and commonly used functions. Recent studies demonstrate that adapting the ADL approach has numerous benefits for the experimental and phenomenological HEP communities. These include facilitating the abstraction, design, optimization, visualization, validation, combination, reproduction, interpretation and overall communication of the analysis contents and long term preservation of the analyses beyond the lifetimes of experiments. Here we also discuss some of the current ADL applications in physics studies and future prospects based on static analysis and differentiable programming.