Karma documentation

Karma is a set of tools intended for use in high-energy physics (HEP) analyses. These analyses process a large amount of data and typically involve many data-processing steps.

Consider the following typical workflow for HEP analyses performed at the CMS experiment:

  1. Skimming: event data in an experiment-specific format (AOD, miniAOD, etc.) is “skimmed” to an analysis-specific format which only stores information relevant for the analysis in question.

  2. N-tuple production: the “skims” are then processed by the main analysis code. This produces so-called n-tuples, which store a fixed number of characteristic quantities for each event

  3. Data reduction: the raw data contained in the n-tuples is then filtered, split into regions and binned to produce final analysis-level objects (i.e. histograms, profile histograms, etc.)

  4. Post-processing: finally, post-processing operations (histogram manipulation, fits, etc.) are applied to the analysis-level objects and the results are extracted or represented graphically (“plotted”).

While the Karma package provides tools for performing each of the steps outlined above, this guide only covers the tools used for the last two steps. They are called Lumberjack (used for data reduction to e.g. histograms) and Palisade (used for generic post-processing).