[Rivet] normalisation to cross-sections

[Leif Lönnblad]

Just to let you know that I'm still interested, although I'm no longer
actively taking part in the code development...

One thing that irritated me with the old HZtool package was the amount
of post-processing one had to do to get out the important plots.
Especially for the unexperienced user, this was a problem (the
experienced user can always quickly hack together anything they want).

So I'm certainly in favor of Rivet pushing out histograms which can be
immediately compared to the experimental data in the plots of the
relevant publication. If the plots are unit-normalized so should be the
resulting Rivet histograms, etc. Of course, we also want to include all
available information for the experienced user to do whatever, but they
can more easily live with having to prod around a bit to find the info.

It would, of course, be nice if Yoda could be designed to keep all the
relevant information with the histogram. I could imagine always keeping
the "raw" bins untouched, but that one could "scale out" different plots
from these. Rivet would set the total cross section and sumOfAllWeights
in the run, and make the default plot scaling. But afterwards we would
still have access to the raw bins and can add runs together and redo the
default scaling, or make any scaling we want. But I guess you have
already thought about this...

Cheers,
Leif




-- 
Leif Lönnblad, Department of Theoretical Physics
Sölvegatan 14A, S-223 62 Lund, Sweden
phone: +46-46 2227780,  fax: +46-46 2229686
e-mail: <Leif.Lonnblad at thep.lu.se>
http://www.thep.lu.se/~leif