Introduction to HZTool

There is a problem in that when a high energy physics measurement is published, it is often very hard (sometimes even impossible) from the published paper to deduce enough details of the analysis such that a new model may be compared appropriately to the measurement. This is particularly the case for measurements of the hadronic final state in high energy collisions, where the specific event shapes variables, jet algorithms and kinematic cuts maybe be rather complex. In the end this means that for any physicist to compare a new calculation (using, for example, a new Monte Carlo model or other new phenomeological input) to a sensible set of relevant data is in practice extremely time consuming and prone to error.

HZTool is designed to solve this problem

HZTool is basically a library of subroutines, each of which corresponds to a published paper. If supplied with the final states of a set of simulated collisions, these routines will perform the analysis of the final state exactly as it was performed in the paper, providing simulated data points which may be compared to the measurement. HZTool therefore has to provide the relevant jet finders, events shape variables etc. It is, however, independent of the generator used to simulate the collisions.

While it is designed to be used as simply as possible as a standalone library, HZTool it is also a key component of JetWeb. HZTool is currently a Fortran library. A C++ replacement is planned.