This is a simple simulation example showing how to run event simulation using the STARlight event generator. The STARlight event generation process is launched in a clean environment by the script run-starlight.sh.

The run-starlight.sh script performs initialisation operations of the enviroment to run STARlight. It copies in the currect directory the relevant files need for the operation from the STARlight installation directory. The relevant files are

slight.in to configure the event generator
starlight2hepmc.awk and pdgMass.awk to convert the output inHepMC2` format.

At the end of the STARlight process, the HepMC2 output file is startlight.hepmc and can be used for the o2 simulation in the second part of this example.

IMPORTANT

To run this example you need to have the STARlight package installed on your system.

$ aliBuild build STARlight --defaults o2

Notice that it is not mandatory to have --defaults o2 given that in this example STARlight runs in a completely separate environment than the one used by the o2 simulation.

WARNING

This example takes the STARlight configuration file slight.in directly from the STARlight installation directory. In that file, the number of events to be generated is hardcoded to N_EVENTS = 1000. Therefore, the number of events that can be injected in the o2 is at maximum NEV = 1000. Of course this can be taken care in a dynamic way, such that STARlight is instructed to generated the number of events that the o2 expects.

IMPROVEMENT

This example can be improved by running STARlight event generator in background and sending the HepMC data into a pipe that is then read by the o2 simulation. For the sake of simplicity of the example, this is not done.