Miles Garcia Research Journal (Summer '21)

6/7:

• Met with Reshmi, Massimo, and Brian to discuss research goals for the summer
• Began installation and setup of VEGAS from Daniela's tutorial
• Created Twiki account
• From Group meeting: Continued to finalize research goals. Access to VERITAS GRB spreadsheet.

6/8:

• Continued to try and set up VEGAS.
• Met with Daniela about VEGAS setup issues, refered these issues to Deivid over Slack also.
• Began looking at GCN's and VERITAS GRB Spreadsheet

6/9:

• Got access to VERITAS data from UCLA for VEGAS setup.
• Continued setting up VEGAS (Stages 1-5 look good now)
• Continued to cross-reference VERITAS-observed GRB's with GCN's
• Looked through 2020 VERITAS/VHE Observations & pSCT Presentation slides (Summer 2020 Colloquium Series)

6/10:

• Ran VEGAS Stage 6 with Crab Data, worked properly this time (multiple runs included)
• Continued to cross-reference VERITAS-observed GRB's with GCN's (went through all 2021 GRBs not on the spreadsheet)
• Attended Reshmi's talk for Barnard Lecture Series
• Looked through plots generated by VEGAS stage 6 for Crab Data

6/11:

• Began looking at 2020 GRBs not on the spreadsheet (only 2)
• Started working on REU Intro Presentation for Monday's REU Lunch (General overview of research, background, goals, people working with)
• Produced basic plots on GRB data-- Number of observations per year, number of LAT and Swift observations (total and by year)
• Began putting together slides for Monday group meeting (update on VEGAS setup, next steps: choosing which GRBs to analyze)
• Read VERITAS Inauguration article (https://cerncourier.com/a/veritas-telescopes-celebrate-first-light/), HESS first VHE GRB article (https://www.mpi-hd.mpg.de/hfm/HESS/pages/home/som/2019/12/#Ref3), and first TeV GRB article (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-019-1750-x) and wrote down key points about GRBs to add to Monday group meeting slides

6/12:

• Finished REU Intro Presentation
• Finished slides for Monday group meeting

6/14:

• Started looking at Peter Cogan's thesis to look at VEGAS Analysis stuff
• REU Lunch-- presented my project information, background on GRBs
• Group Meeting-- presented info on VERITAS GRB Observations, next steps (choosing what GRBs to analyze), and readings I did on GRBs. Came up with some steps for deciding what other GRBs to do analysis on.

6/15:

• Looked at spreadsheet of VERITAS GRB Observations to get an idea of what information is missing (and can be filled in)-- specifically for Swift GRBs
• REU Lecture on Dark Matter
• Met with Reshmi about accessing VERITAS data (elogs, loggen), steps to get started with choosing GRBs
• Read parts of article Colin sent about short GRBs from BNS
• Started looking at Tevcat & VERITAS data

6/16:

• Gathered information from Tevcat and GCN's on the 4 VHE GRBs listed on Tevcat. Plotted the GRBs on a map of the galactic plane.
• Began running VEGAS analysis of the most recent GRB detection from last Friday (GRB210610B). Runlist, time cuts and extra options provided by Deivid in order to have an accurate cross-check. Using VEGAS v2.5.7 because Deivid reported potential issues in v2.5.8.
• Read Taylor Aune's slides on GRBs from 2010 talk.

6/17:

• Updated Tevcat GRB spreadsheet with information about time after initial observation in which VHE rays were still observed (how long after a GRB is observed can we still see VHE?)
• Worked with astropy to create the same mapping of GRBs as the automatic plot from Tevcat
• Still waiting on VEGAS (or maybe it has failed?)

6/18:

• Updated Tevcat GRB spreadsheet with information about time after initial observation in which VHE rays were still observed (how long after a GRB is observed can we still see VHE?)
• Worked with astropy to create the same mapping of GRBs as the automatic plot from Tevcat
• Still waiting on VEGAS (or maybe it has failed?)

6/21:

• Added GRB210610B (and additional information about it) to the list of GRBs observed by VERITAS
• Attended both sessions of the VERITAS Summer Collaboration Meeting
• Meeting with Reshmi about plans for this week
• Started looking at general ideas for motivation-- why study GRBs? Good starting point-- slides for REU Introduction Presentation

6/22:

• Attended Morning Session for VERITAS Summer Collaboration Meeting
• Went to Barnard Summer Colloquium Series & REU Lecture Series
• Continued working on motivation for GRB analysis-- went back through Reshmi's slides from the first Barnard Lecture Series meeting to add to motivations

6/23:

• Attended both sessions of the VERITAS Summer Collaboration Meeting
• Continued adding points for motivation stuff

6/24:

• Attended morning session of VERITAS Summer Collaboration Meeting
• Went to Barnard Summer Colloquium Series
• Meeting with Reshmi & Undergraduates-- basics of VHE Gamma Ray Astronomy, VERITAS, CTA
• Met with Deivid about plans for future, GRB analysis, etc

6/25:

• Started working on slides for group meeting Monday-- Tevcat info, Motivation stuff
• Looked into python stuff for reading in csv files (potentially for editing GRB Observation spreadsheet with some gammapy utility)

6/28:

• Finished slides for group meeting
• Looked into gammapy EBL absorption models
• Group meeting: Discussed plan for GRBs to analyze. Do weighting function for Tevcat GRBs, then get zenith information to find Energy threshold on Deivid's list of GRBs --> compute updated weight for those with accurate energy threshold.

6/29:

• Started looking for Energy Thresholds for the Tevcat GRBs-- some are difficult to find
• Got zenith angles for VERITAS GRBs, used VERITAS performance papers to calculate energy threshold based on zenith angles.
• Got gammapy working through Nevis cluster

6/30:

• Got redshift, time delay information for the list of VERITAS GRBs (to be used to calculate weight)
• Read through documentation on how to use gammapy to calculate EBL absorption coefficients
• Calculated weight values for VERITAS GRBs with gammapy

7/1:

• Calculated weight values for Tevcat GRBs based on the information I could find for energy threshold.
• Comparing my weight values to Deivid's (which had constant energy threshold of ~400 GeV), realized some math in the weight calculation was off-- fixed this issue and re-calculated weights. Now they look good.
• Barnard Summer Colloquium Series

7/2:

• Deivid sent some updated information on Tevcat GRB Energy thresholds, so updated those weights with that information.
• Put all weight information together in spreadsheet with Deivid's previous values, sent this information to Deivid to decide where to go based off of weight values.
• Plan for next week: start analysis of GRB201216C, get runlists for the other chosen GRBs and then move on to analysis of those-- first also will need time cuts, additional info

7/6:

• Started running the condor jobs for GRB201216C
• Looked up and documented the run info for the other GRBs, including issues (weather, hardware, etc)
• Made slides for group meeting
• Group Meeting (Slides: VERITAS_Group_Meeting_7_6.pdf)

7/7:

• Found that one condor job for s4 failed (segfault, we have seen this issue before). So we decided to use v2.5.7 instead, and do two sets of analysis for each GRB: itm and standard analysis, both soft cuts.
• Restarted VEGAS process in 2.5.7 for GRB201216C
• Used Loggen to get the runlists for the other GRB candidates, and started setting up the VEGAS process for those (having to download run files made this very slow)
• Started condor jobs for GRB170519A with both cuts.

7/8:

• Began processing condor jobs for the rest of the GRBs -- itm analysis up to stage 4, then will figure out time cuts and do stage 5 after
• Tracked condor jobs on spreadsheet to record which are done, which still need to be done, issues/errors
• Barnard Summer Colloqium Series

7/9:

• Finished recording itm analysis info (for jobs that finished later at night)
• Submitted condor jobs for standard analysis
• Continued tracking those jobs on spreadsheet

7/12:

• For condor jobs that timed out, ran the VEGAS process in the terminal (rather than via condor) to finish them up to s4.
• Started adding time cuts for GRBs that were ready to do s5
• Made Slides for Group Meeting (Slides: VERITAS_Group_Meeting_7_12.pdf)

7/13:

• Added time cuts for remaining GRBs
• Started s5 on the GRBs that finished s4 (the ones where s4 was executed in the terminal)
• REU Lecture
• Ran stage 6 on GRB201216C for standard analysis, saved plots

7/14:

• Ran stage6 on GRB201216C for itm analysis
• Started moving onto s6 for other GRBs (first doing standard analysis then itm)
• Started working with Deivid's python code which creates plots from the .fits files (significance, excess...)

7/15:

• Continued with stage 6 itm analysis for GRBs (whichever ones hadn't done it yet)
• Started on VEGAS testing. Want to test VEGAS to see what configurations cause crashes (and what the errors are) from: [2.5.7 vs 2.5.8, itm on vs itm off, TDRBM on vs TDRBM off]. 2^3 = 8 configurations. Will use Crab dataset that I already ran for the runlist (this also knocks out one configutation, 2.5.8 no itm no TDRBM).
• First step for this is to set up stages 1-5 in itm on and off (have to do separately) for 2.5.7 and 2.5.8. Then I can run those in stage6 with TDRBM on/off.
• Barnard Summer Colloquium Series

7/16:

• Stages 1-5 for VEGAS testing done, proceeding to stage 6 (first TDRBM off then on, 2.5.8 first, then 2.5.7). Results are recorded in a spreadsheet.
• Attempting to combat GRB170519A errors-- used commandline to update permissions on s1 file that was causing crashes because it got permission denied to access.
• Still getting some weird issues though, so going to have to look at it again-- now issue in s2?

7/19:

• Finished VEGAS testing. Tried to work through problem for [2.5.8, itm off, TDRBM on] but it might be an actual error/failure for that configuration given how [2.5.8, itm off, TDRBM off] was working fine with same cfg/.sh file and the TDRBM on issues seem to be stemming from that place.
• Gathered RBM and wobble results for the completed s6 GRBs and recorded them on spreadsheet.
• Re-ran VEGAS s1-4 for GRB170519A because of some weird errors that occured from trying to just fix one run. Still has one error on run 86212 (segfault) but other errors were cleaned up.
• Made slides for Group Meeting (Slides: VERITAS_Group_Meeting_7_19.pdf)

7/20:

• Continued looking at python code for extracting significance and excess plots/maps.
• Started to rework the code a bit to add information directly from the .reg file for exclusion regions and the source-- need to get the labeling to work
• REU Lecture

7/21:

• Completed addition to python code to add labels for all regions (Source + exclusion) on each plot, directly from .reg file (except names which are only commented in the .reg file)
• Used the code to save significance and excess plots for all GRBs with s6 completed w/ updated labels
• Re-ran GRB170519A s4 itm for run 86212 with debug and saved files for s1-s4 to look at the segfault error in the run

7/22:

• Updated code for plots to correctly fit the plot labels when saving the files to computer (was getting cut off but used tight fit mode)
• Remade all plots that had labels cut off
• Barnard Summer Colloquium Series

7/26:

• Collected all GRB plots + vegas results for group meeting slides
• Fixed a few plots which were accidently redundant
• Made group meeting slides

7/27:

• Started reading flux descriptions and VEGAS + UL documents
• Started outline for final paper
• Last REU Lecture

7/28:

• Talked with Deivid about calculating upper limits
• Tried to calculate Luminosity UL for SN2020tcw (which Deivid also did, to make sure that I am doing it right)
• Continued outline for paper

7/29:

• Re-did my UL calculation for SN2020tcw after talking with Deivid a bit more, now it is working
• Calculated luminosity UL for my GRBs (the 4 that are good to go) using python code
• Started actual paper
• Last Barnard Summer Colloquium Series

7/30:

• Continued writing paper

7/31:

• Continued writing paper
• Started making the final presentation slides

8/1:

• Continued making final presentation slides

-- Miles Garcia - 2021-06-08

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