7 up man dancing to give the page a cool 90's look! Tony LaTorre's Home Page

A picture of me in Creighton mine!

Editor Preferences

vim

Papers

My Favorite Physics Papers

Clearing Up Mysteries -- The Original Goal by Edwin T. Jaynes (link)

What to say about this paper? Wow. It's an epic whirlwind of ideas. Although Jaynes is probably not entirely correct in his analysis of EPR, I think the ideas he brings up are still interesting. In the third paper he computes the theoretical efficiency of a muscle using nothing but probability theory and shows that our muscles are within a few percent of that.

Open Source Software I've created

Moji

Moji is a C program to help communicate with someone who had a stroke, similar to a communication board.

LeCrunch

LeCrunch is a script to take data from LeCroy oscilloscopes over ethernet. It can be used to create a simple cheap "DAQ" system just by using an existing oscilloscope. By using the oscilloscope in sequence mode, you can take data at up to 1 kHz!

Chroma (docs)

Chroma is a high performance optical photon simulation for particle physics detectors. It tracks individual photons passing through a triangle mesh detector geometry simulating processes like diffuse and specular reflections, refraction, Rayleigh scattering and absorption.

With the assistance of a CUDA-enabled GPU, Chroma can propagate 2.5 million photons per second in a detector with 29,000 photomultiplier tubes. This is 200x faster than the same simulation with Geant4.

Chroma was initially designed to be used for the LBNE experiment. Although it is no longer being actively developed, Chroma is now being used by other collaborations.

Here is a short list of papers which have cited Chroma:

  • "Distributed Imaging for Liquid Scintillation Detectors" (2017) arXiv:1711.09851.
  • "The Dichroicon: Spectral Photon Sorting For Large-Scale Cherenkov and Scintillation Detectors" (2019) arXiv:1912.10333.

It also provided inspiration for another photon Monte Carlo called Opticks (see the paper Opticks : GPU Optical Photon Simulation for Particle Physics using NVIDIA OptiX)

Open Source Software I've contributed to

Redis (link)

Redis is an in memory database. I use redis as a database for the monitoring website that I created for SNO+, but I also use a lot of the code in redis for the SNO+ DAQ software. While developing that software I've found a few bugs and submitted patches which were eventually accepted into redis.

Metrics Graphics (link)

Metrics Graphics is a javascript library for plotting graphs and histograms created by Mozilla. I use this library for the SNO+ monitoring website and I submitted quite a few pull requests when I first started using it.

GENIE Event Generator (link)

The GENIE Event Generator is an open source library for simulating neutrino interactions. I am using the library as part of my thesis and contributed a few small changes to the atmospheric event generator.

My Favorite Movies

Other Stuff

Blog Posts

Contact

tlatorre at uchicago