John Dickson - Summer 2023 Research Journal

Meeting slides

Link: https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1IVPh1cHxFtIzE1Hm5Rvib162wjKkLefh?usp=sharing

First Week

- Mainly Computer Tutorials, setting self up in the system, completed Python Path of the ROOT Tutorial

Second Week

Monday - Met with Ruo to talk about project, reading of Ralph Bird's Thesis to get up to speed on VEGAS and VERITAS. VERITAS Help session at 11:30am, got through a decent amount of the VEGAS tutorial up until we had to download data from UCLA (unable to due to Takeru not being there). My project is still in limbo right now due to needing to get some more time to talk with Rene about the possibility of me starting something that would continue into the next academic year back at UCLA.

Tuesday - Attended Galatic Meeting and LHAASO Source Meeting with Kaya Mori. Got a little more info on my project, specifically source J1956-2845. Went through a little bit of the analysis tutorial but mostly read more papers pertaining to VEGAS. Had the Neutrino Presentation with Mike Shaevits.

Wednesday - Work from campus day. Mostly read papers and got VEGAS working. VEGAS seems to be working as normal and I am able to grab most of the important things from the software. Had presentation at group meeting to go over the start of my project with J1956+2845. Did some more research onto everything we know so far about J1956+2845 and all of the possible sources in the vicinity of it.

Thursday - At Nevis. Did some more research into J1956+2845 and compiled information into google doc. Information ended up being bad news since what we learned is that J1956+2845 was a very extended source, on the order of 2 degrees. Since the source is so big, we wouldn't be able to run any meaningful analysis on the source since having no data whatsoever would not say anything. Instead I met with Ruo and Reshmi and we decided that I should find a different source among the new LHAASO sources which we have archival data on so I compiled a list with relevant information about each source for which we have archival data. Still need to meet with Ruo and Reshmi to talk about which sources could be potential targets. Also still want to meet with Reshmi and Rene to talk about if any long term projects should start over the summer or not.

Friday - Work from Campus, met with Ruo to pick new candidate sources for my summer project after I narrowed down the catagories. Currently going through all known information on three sources to decide which one to start analysis work on. Had the REU Presentation on XENON by Knut Mora. Got a lab tour of the XENON experiment from Michael.

Third Week

Monday - Narrowed down source search to just 1LHAASO J1858+0330 and 1LHAASO J2027+3657. Having emailed Rene, he said to choose J1858 since it is alreaady detected in TeV energies and would be a better start project. Read papers on both of the sources to get a better feel for what they are but going to need to reread all the papers. Worked a bit more on presentation for tomorrow.

Tuesday - Met with Ruo and Colin and ironed out a possible project that gives me work to do for the next week or so. We went ahead and are thinking of doing better multimessenger analysis of 1LHAASO J1858+0330. We are going to first have me do Gamma ray analysis of the source with the VERITAS data that we already have. I would do this by taking the 20 hours of data and finding an additional 20 hours of crab data to find the gamma free background in an extragalatic source to help estimate error in VERITAS analysis since the source is decently extended. This would be of the same elevation. We are then planning on comparing this to radio data to make a possible improvement of data to already existing radio/gamma analysis.

Wednesday - Started to go through the data for HESS J1857+026 since this would be the source that J1858+0330 is in the field of view of. Found that some of the DQM plots were missing so currently investigating to figure out why this would be the case. Once I have figured this out and applied all the time cuts the plan is to submit the runs to condor to start the analysis. Also need to finish pulling the 20 hours of crab data in the correct elevation to estimate background. Figured out Colin's code with the help of Colin, Thank you, and got a complete runlist of the data I need for analysis of 1LHAASO J1858+0330. Going to start analysis tomorrow after checking all the DQM plots and applying time cuts.

Thursday - Not much done because of Finals. I was able to get all the data that I needed for time cut analysis so that will be tomorrow mornings job to get all the time cuts set for the runlist.

Friday - Finished going through and adding time cuts that DQM didn't have, started the process of downloading all the runs in a screen since it takes a while. To do this I taught myself how to work with screens in UNIX. After the REU lecture I went through and started to compile a list of Crab data to analyze for background of the analysis.

Fourth Week

Monday - Holiday Juneteenth

Tuesday - Submitted Stages 1-5 for the LHAASO source data. Mostly then worked on getting familiar with how to analyze said data with things like astropy and gammapy. Also attended Matthew Millard's presentation on the Galactic call about SNR W44 and the morphology he found using XMM data. Since W44 is in my analysis FOV, might be doing some secondary analysis of W44 with VEGAS.

Wednesday - Debugged stage 6 for LHAASO data, attended group meeting and got my plan set for the next couple of days as to what things are a priority.

Thursday - Started downloading Crab data, going to start stages 1-5 on the new Crab Data. Read papers about source size and flux/ pulsar spin down luminosity. Put all that data into a google doc and will talk to Ruo about it sometime tomorrow. Went through gammapy and was able to get it to open and read in my fits files/ plot the fits files. However I ran into some difficulty in that the fits files are very different than what is output in stage 6 of VEGAS, specifically looking at the output of the postscript files so the plan is to dig through the documentation to see what VEGAS is doing to the fits files and how I can emulate it in astropy/gammapy or better yet load it into astropy/gammapy.

Friday - Started the day with emailing Rene and Anna my coworker from UCLA about getting together some better documentation for VEGAS. Got my plot to start to look like some of the VEGAS outputs but still confused on how VEGAS is making the plots look better/ How to extract the finished plots so going to go in and ask Colin probably on how to get them/ Jooyun. Still waiting on Crab data to download.

Fifth Week

Started Stages 1-5 of Crab Data, need to work more with Colin to figure out why some of it worked and some of it didn't. Not much else due to me getting the Flu on Tuesday and not being well again until Monday of the next week.

Sixth Week

Wednesday - Plan is to talk to Ruo to figure out what are next steps so as to keep on schedule with the program. Need to talk to Colin about why my stage 6 failed and specifically why it seems some of stage 5 failed.

Thursday - Got stage 6 to work for my Crab data. Started downloading the 3C273 data that I needed for the background estimation. Most of the day was spent to trying to understand more about the acceptance plots that VEGAS outputs for each and how changing the exclusion radius changes the acceptance plot.

Friday - Started stages 1-5 for 3C273. Did more experimenting with stage 6 for the crab data but so far nothing to report because of me having to do some more debugging so overriding of data doesn't happen. Met with Dr. Mukherjee to discuss what should go into my REU presentation and report and now have a good place to start writing both of those.

Seventh Week

Monday - Mostly working to try and debug what is wrong with VEGAS when processing extended sources. Ran most of that along with stage 6 of my 3C273 data. Kept working on report and am making steady progress on the introduction and background section.

Tuesday - Started to have issues with getting data from my postscript files and need some help with figuring out why they are not opening in python. The background data for different source exclusion zones finally processed and I have found some weird results. When the source radius is at 0.4 or 0.7, the background acceptance plot doesn't change so the way it is processing the background for both of those is good. However when the source exclusion radius is set to 0.9, the background is drastically different from 0.4 or 0.7. Also I have encountered a bug in which if the radius is set to 1 or larger the analysis fails which seems to be a bug in VEGAS.

Wednesday - Today was the Galactic VERITAS Collaboration meeting, and the talks were interesting in that a decent amount of people in the group are working on how VEGAS does analysis as well as how to do extended source analysis with VEGAS. I also was able to get different integration window analysis' done for 3C-273 and will be able to hopefully make some plots about the differences in background modeling when the windows are different. I also worked more on my report and am making steady progress on the background information.

Thursday - Mostly worked on report as well as finishing up analysis for 3C-273 and Crab. Report is going well but will need some more assistance especially understanding why we use 5 sigma to do Gamma-ray astronomy.

Friday - Made a number of 2D acceptance plots for both the Crab and 3C-273 for the meeting this week. Need to meet with Ruo to discuss what they mean as well as where to go from there. Also will need to talk to Colin about how to extract the right information from the 1D acceptance plots, or at least how to get the plot that VEGAS outputs.

Eighth Week

There are no day distinctions for this week due to the sickness I had but also due to the rapid progress that was made. This week I was able to create most all of the plots that are needed for the look at background estimation in VEGAS. This includes background significance maps, count maps, excess maps, alpha maps, as well as some 1D representations of those maps. The goal now is just to make the significance distribution plots and then to work hard on paper/presentation. I will over the weekend start to work on the slides to present at the group meeting on Wednesday as well as the slides that will eventually be the final presentation slides for the REU program.

Comments