Julia Interfaces to HepMC3

Description

In high-energy physics experiments at CERN it is necessary to simulate physics events in order to compare predicted observations with those that the LHC experiments actually observe. A key piece of the software chain used to do that is the HepMC3 event record library, which encodes the output from physics event generators in a standard way, so that they can be used by downstream detector simulation and analysis codes.

There is now increasing interest in using Julia as a language for HEP software, as it combines the ease of programming in interactive languages, e.g., Python, with the speed of compiled language, such as C++. As part of building up the ecosystem of supporting packages for Julia in high-energy physics, developing interfaces to read, manipulated and write HepMC3 event records in Julia is the aim of this project.

Task ideas

This project would develop a wrapper library for HepMC3 allowing the HepMC3 data objects and methods, in C++, to be called from Julia.

It would utilise the general underlying wrapper interfaces in CxxWrap and the automated wrapper code generator WrapIt! to allow for as easy and maintainable an interface as possible.

A key outcome would be a set of unit tests and examples, based on the HepMC3 ones, demonstrating how to use the library and proving that the code is correct.

Expected results and milestones

Reading of HepMC3 event files
- Particularly the ASCII format will be targeted first
Access to event data structures
- Access to particle properties
- Navigation of the event and the vertices between parent and child particles
- Access to run information
Update of HepMC3 data structures
Creation of new HepMC3 events
Re-serialisation of these events to file
- Initially ASCII
Documentation and examples on how to use the Julia interfaces
HepMC3.jl package registered in the Julia general registry
Extension of serialisation to ROOT format (stretch goal)