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CheckMATE Tutorial @ MC4BSM, 2018

Intro

This tutorial will guide you through some practical examples to learn how CheckMATE works. We have chosen three toy models which you will consecutively analyze. In addition to CheckMATE, we will also run some other tools that are useful for collider phenomenology. For better understanding, we will also ask short questions to make sure that the tasks are well understood. It is important as CheckMATE can be used for a large class of different models and hence it is important when looking at particular examples why some features of a given model require a certain setup.

Along the way you will find the following three important icons:

Question marks provide you with simple questions that usually go slightly beyond provided explanations and test the general understanding. Some are more, some are less difficult, depending on your background knowledge. What can you do to check your answers?
[Show Answer]

Exclamation marks require your active participation. These are the most important bits of the tutorial and you should not continue without having completed the task (unless explicitly told, as we sometimes might do two things in parallel).
For now, you just have to go to the CheckMATE homepage and press CTRL+D to bookmark it for future.

Obviously, this is a combination of the above two. You have to perform an active task in order to find an answer which you then can check. Click on the CheckMATE logo at the top of this page and take a look at the larger version. What is written on the two kings? What does it mean?
[Show Answer]

Setup

The practical examples of this tutorial all relate to a virtual machine that has been set up for you. However, we encourage you to install CheckMATE on your computer following the Installation tutorial. You can find more information on the virtual machine here.

The machine runs Linux and you will need some standard commands to follow the tasks here:

  • cd dir     enters directory dir
  • cat file     prints the content of file inside the terminal
  • emacs file     opens emacs editor to edit file
  • ./executable param1 param2 ...     runs the executable in the current directory with parameters param1 etc

Copying/Pasting can be done either by using right-click or the key shortcuts (Shift + Ctrl + C/V). Beware that there is an extra Shift here, as Ctrl + C kills the current process!

Contents

In Exercise 1 you will test a SUSY parameter point with CheckMATE. We will then have a quick look at the results.
Start Exercise 1

In Exercise 2 we will compare five different modes for running CheckMATE. With these results we will then try to reproduce ATLAS exclusion line to see how reliable CheckMATE is in setting limits.
Start Exercise 2

In Excersise 3 you will use your knowledge from the previous exercises to simulate events for the MC4BSM model (so you will know how to test in principle any model with CheckMATE)
Start Exercise 3