The Physics Analysis Workstation (PAW) is an interactive, scriptable computer software tool for data analysis and graphical presentation in

High Energy Physics Particle physics or high energy physics is the study of Elementary particle, fundamental particles and fundamental interaction, forces that constitute matter and radiation. The fundamental particles in the universe are classified in the Standa ...

(HEP). The development of this software tool started at

CERN The European Organization for Nuclear Research, known as CERN (; ; ), is an intergovernmental organization that operates the largest particle physics laboratory in the world. Established in 1954, it is based in a northwestern suburb of Gen ...

in 1986, it was optimized for the processing of very large amounts of data. It was based on and intended for inter-operation with components of

CERNLIB The CERN Program Library or CERNLIB was a set of FORTRAN 77 libraries and modules, developed at the European Organization for Nuclear Research CERN. Its content ranged from more specialized data analysis of high energy physics to general purpose ...

, an extensive collection of Fortran libraries. PAW had been a standard tool in high energy physics for decades, yet was essentially unmaintained. Despite continuing popularity as of 2008, it has been losing ground to the

C++ C++ (pronounced "C plus plus") is a high-level general-purpose programming language created by Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup as an extension of the C programming language, or "C with Classes". The language has expanded significan ...

-based

ROOT In vascular plants, the roots are the organs of a plant that are modified to provide anchorage for the plant and take in water and nutrients into the plant body, which allows plants to grow taller and faster. They are most often below the su ...

package. Conversion tutorials exist. In 2014, development and support were stopped.

Sample script

PAW uses its own scripting language. Here is sample code (with its actual output), which can be used to plot data gathered in files.

* read data
vector/read X,Y input_file.dat

* eps plot

fort/file 55 gg_ggg_dsig_dphid_179181.eps
meta 55 -113

opt linx   ,  linear scale
opt logy   ,  logarithmic scale

* here goes plot

set plci 1       ,  line color
set lwid 2       ,  line width
set dmod 1       ,  line type (solid, dotted, etc.)
graph 32 X Y AL   ,  32 stands for input data lines in input file

* plot title and comments

set txci 1
atitle ' (deg)' 'd d  (mb)'

set txci 1
text 180.0 2e1 ' 179...181 deg' 0.12

close 55

References

External links

PAW (at CERN)

The PAW History Seen by the CERN Computer News Letters

CERNLIB (at CERN)

ROOT (at CERN)
Free science software Free software programmed in Fortran Physics software CERN software {{physics-software-stub