Welcome to Birmingham. The first thing to do is read the guide to the local system. This will teach you how to use the computer system in Birmingham and how to get a Grid Certificate. If you have any problems/queries regarding the computer system get in touch with Mark Slater.

Here is a (probably incomplete) list of things you should try and do in your first week of the PhD:

• Meet Nige.
• Get a key for the office (stores).
• Get a Grid Certificate.
  • Talk to Mark Slater about how to get it
• Register as an external LHCb member. https://account.cern.ch/account/Externals/RegisterAccount.aspx
• Complete university paperwork (important for getting paid).
• Complete teaching contract (again, important for getting paid).
• Register for MPAGS modules: http://mpags.nottingham.ac.uk/mpags/
• Read through this "live" document that summarises a lot of general advice for new students on LHCb: Here.

Once you are officially a member of LHCb, you can log into lxplus, which is a computing system used at CERN. Open up a terminal window and type:

ssh -X user@lxplus.cern.ch 

The -X option allows you to open new windows from that session, and the lxplus5 specifies that you want to use Scientific Linux 5 (slc5) as opposed to slc6 which is available but not yet fully supported.

Once you are in you can start to work your way through the LHCb Software Tutorials here . Start with the general tutorials and then try the Ganga and DaVinci tutorials. These will be enough to get started on a physics analysis.

Starter Kit

In recent years a new addition to LHCb has been the Starter Kit which is workshop held at CERN aiming to get all new members familiar with the main software, it is highly recommended you partake in this workshop which is usually held in the autumn, information can be found https://lhcb.github.io/starterkit-lessons/. The tutorials found on this page are far easier to digest compared to the older DaVinci tutorials described above and give advice on how to obtain data from the grid and get started.

Another "starterkit" though not an in-person workshop can be found here, this is the source material for the analysis essentials website, a series of lessons for helping high-energy physics analysts become more comfortable working with the shell, version control, and programming. It includes basics of the bash shell, git, and python alongside how to use them for analyses.

Commonly used Software

There are many possible pieces of software available to assist you during the PhD? , but the following list summarises the software commonly used within the Birmingham group or LHCb in general.

• Mattermost - This is a real-time messenger service like Slack, it is used throughout the LHCb collaboration to communicate with your working group or fellow colleagues. The Birmingham LHCb group has a personal one, as does the Birmingham Particle Physics group generally.
• Zoom - This is the video calling method of choice for the LHCb collaboration, most meetings with a remote component will use Zoom.
• PuTTy - This is an ssh for windows that allows for remote access to a terminal, e.g. to lxplus.
• Xming - This is an X11 forwarding program, this allows your machine to display a graphical Linux program that is being executed on a remote Linux server instance.
• WinScp - This is a program to allow for copying and moving files between local and remote machines on windows with a GUI.
• Thunderbird - This is a program that allows you to connect multiple email accounts to be able to compile all your emails in one place. This is not officially used by the collaboration as a whole but is widely used due to people typically having: a personal email; a departmental email; and a CERN email. Other email compilers are available.
• Overleaf - While not technically software but a website, overleaf is worth mentioning. This is an online LaTeX? editer that allows projects to be accessed remotely via your account, this can be particularly used for larger documents or working in collaboration with others. Additionally, overleaf can be connected to a git repository to allow for backups of documents to be taken in various stages.

Useful Tips, Tricks and Resources

• LHCb Meeting schedule - This is a useful link to save as a bookmark, as it shows all the LHCb meetings of the week which can be useful to find when your working group meeting is (or get its zoom link) as well as non-regular meetings too.

• CERN library Proxy - This is a useful link that can be used to unlock academic papers that are behind paywalls via your CERN account as CERN has access to many e-books and journals.

• Terminal Working Guide - This is a beginner's tutorial on how to navigate the terminal environment and introduction to a text editor "vim" to code with.

• tmux - This is a useful command that creates a terminal environment that allows for multiple tabs and panes to be used in one terminal window. You can leave things running in a tmux session then "detach" it which will leave it running in the background even if you log out and turn your laptop off, making it very useful indeed. A general cheatsheet can be found here.

• LHCb Glossary - This is a website made by LHCb to summarise terms that are commonly used within LHCb and HEP generally. A useful place to go if you don't know what an acronym stands for.

• bash profiles - If you are running linux, you can use the bash_profile or bashrc file to customise your working environment in your terminal. This can be from minor things like creating aliases to common locations or commands with arguments or appearance modifications. There are plenty of people online that share what they include in their profiles so you can see if any are useful to you.
  • e.g. a function to easily renew the $DISPLAY environment variable to allow for images to be viewed over ssh (using evince for example on a pdf) when in a tmux session that has been detached and reattached with a new login:

             function display(){
                 if [ $# -eq 0 ]; then
                      export DISPLAY="`tmux show-env | sed -n 's/^DISPLAY=//p'`"
                 else
                       export DISPLAY=localhost:$1
                 fi
             }

-- JamesMccarthy - 11 Nov 2012