This package includes a collection of tools used by the STAR experiment to evaluate reconstruction of charged particle tracks and vertices. The STAR detector at the Relativistic Heavy Ion Collider (RHIC) in Brookhaven National Laboratory is a multipurpose experiment designed to study properties of high and medium energy nuclear collisions.

Although, the code in this package is mainly tested with and designed to support reconstruction and analysis of the data collected by the STAR experiment we hope other new or existing experiments will find it useful as well. This project can also serve as an example for other implementations of track and vertex evaluation toolkits who chose to save time and effort by building around travex, a detector-independent suite for track and vertex reconstruction evaluation [https://github.com/plexoos/travex].

The following individual tools are available:

• stihify (stihify/README.md) is used to measure the efficiency of hits assigned to the track by a track reconstruction algorithm. For single hit efficiency studies with stihify we developed a method independent of the actual reconstruction algorithm used for finding particle tracks.

• vtxhist and vtxreco (vtxeval/README.md) are aimed to evaluate the performance of vertex finding algorithms. vtxreco requires environment variable $STAR to be set.

• stiscan (stiscan/README.md) is used to verify the accuracy of the modeled detector material.

• stargeo builds ROOT's TGeo geometry corresponding to a geometry tag (e.g. <gtag> = y2010b, y2015d, or y2018a) provided as an argument and saves it in stargeo_<gtag>.root file. For available geometry tags see https://drupal.star.bnl.gov/STAR/comp/prod/MCGeometry. The created TGeo geometry can be viewed with a ROOT macro, src/geo/viewTGeo.C, as:

  root 'viewTGeo.C("path/to/stargeo_.root")'

• stigeo . Requires environment variable $STAR to be set and a local StarDb/

Documentation generated by doxygen can be found at http://star-bnl.github.io/star-travex

How to build and install the libraries and tools

Prerequisites

• cmake (>= 3.6)
• C++ compiler with C++11 support (e.g. g++ >= 4.8.2)
• ROOT (>= 5.34.30), http://root.cern.ch
• boost libraries (>= 1.54): program_options, regex, and filesystem
• This project also depends on some modules from the STAR software library. These are already included as dependencies in the ext/ subdirectory.

Build with cmake

Checkout the code using the following command:

$ git clone https://github.com/star-bnl/star-travex.git

Compile and build the tools:

$ cd star-travex/
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake ../
$ cmake --build ./ -- -j4 install

If the environment variable $STAR_HOST_SYS is specified the binaries will be placed in the CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX/.$STAR_HOST_SYS directory with CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX being the current directory by default.

Build within STAR environment

We assume that the user environment includes the shell variables availabe within a typical STAR account. Specifically, $OPTSTAR contains the prefix path and is used to help cmake find the appropriate boost release.

$ git clone https://github.com/star-bnl/star-travex.git
$ cd star-travex/
$ mkdir build && cd build
$ cmake -D CMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=./ \
        -D BOOST_ROOT=$OPTSTAR \
        -D CMAKE_BUILD_TYPE=RelWithDebInfo ../
$ cmake --build ./ -- -j4 install