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:

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:

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.