Superscan

A First Superscan Tutorial

First, you'll need an account on the physics Linux cluster. You'll need to be a member of the neutrino group.

Superscan

Superscan is an event display program that allows visual display of Super-K events. It's not the only existing SK event display, but it's one of the nicest-looking and easiest-to-use ones. Event display programs are sometimes called "scanners" and looking at events with them is often referred to as "scanning".

Setup

Put the following in your .tcshrc file (you will need to change to tcsh if you do not have it; on the Physics machines this can be done using ypchsh):

setenv PROJECT /var/phy/project/hep/neutrino
source $PROJECT/soft/sk-k2k-FC8-07d.login

What this does is to set up various SK-related Unix environment variables for you.

Data Files

Super-K data files that can be read by superscan are in a format known as "ZBS". File extensions for ZBS files are often ".zbs" or sometimes ".dat" (but can be anything). ZBS makes use of a godawful (yet still quite prevalent) Fortran-based data structure management package called Zebra. Information is stored in "banks"; superscan knows how to read various different kinds of banks.

A few example data files can be found in

/var/phy/project/hep/neutrino/work/schol/superk/data

The ones to look at for this tutorial are

```
ofl_run024646.052.000256.000258
```
This is an (almost) raw data file with very little selection.
```
data_022133.40.zbs
```
This is a file of selected stopping cosmic ray muons.
```
apfit.10000-10437.final
```
This is a file of selected "fully-contained" atmospheric neutrino events, with reconstructed information.
```
atmmc.0001.fit
```
This is a file of simulated (Monte Carlo) atmospheric neutrino events, with reconstructed information.

Running Superscan

Next, you'll want to run superscan. The superscan executable is

$EXPERIMENT_ROOT/atmpd/src/displays/superscan/Linux_pc/superscan

Type this on the command line to start it. You can select a data file to look at by either using the pull-down menu and typing in the filename, or by specifying the filename on the command line, e.g.

$EXPERIMENT_ROOT/atmpd/src/displays/superscan/Linux_pc/superscan -f yummy_events.zbs

Stuff to Try

Take a look at the files listed above. (The first one has a bunch of junk "pedestal" events at the beginning of it; you can either step through them by hitting "Next Event" or using the "Event" pull-down menu to "Skip" 10 events or so). Scan through a bunch of events. See if you can figure out what the events are.
Try time and charge mode, and try turning on charge radius mode.
Try spinning the events.
Try changing the color scale.
Try some of the options, such as different views. Not all of them will work or be relevant for a given file.
See what happens when you modify the time window.
For the files with reconstructed information, try turning on and off the fit display.
See if you can figure out how to create Postscript output for printing.
Etc...