pyslha 2.1.0

Parsing, manipulating, and visualising SUSY Les Houches Accord data

A simple but flexible handler of the SUSY Les Houches Accord (SLHA) data format.

pyslha is a parser/writer module for particle physics SUSY Les Houches Accord (SLHA) supersymmetric spectrum/decay files, and a collection of scripts which use the interface, e.g. for conversion to and from the legacy ISAWIG format, or to plot the mass spectrum and decay chains.

The current release supports SLHA version 1, and as far as I’m aware is also fully compatible with SLHA2: the block structures are read and accessed generically. If you have any problems, please provide an example input file and I’ll happily investigate.

The plotting script provides output in PDF, EPS and PNG via LaTeX and the TikZ graphics package, and as LaTeX/TikZ source for direct embedding into documents or user-tweaking of the generated output.

Users of version 1.x should note that the interface has changed a little in version 2.0.0 and onward, in particular in the interface of the Block objects, which are now more dict-like: entries can be added and accessed via the usual square-brackets indexing operators, including for multiple indices as is common for mixing matrices e.g. NMIX[1,2] as opposed to the old NMIX.entries[1][2] way. This does break backward compatibility but is a big improvement both for internal code sanity and usability. The Block interface also now supplies dict-like has_key(), keys(), and items() methods, as well as more specialist value(), set_value() and is_single_valued() methods for improved access to ALPHA and any other unindexed blocks.

Please cite PySLHA via the URL http://insectnation.org/projects/pyslha if it is useful to you in the production of an academic paper. A PySLHA publication will be provided at some point… watch this space!

TODOs:

For 2.2.0:

• Add Sphinx docs.

• Preserve comments from read -> write (needs full-line/inline comment separation). Can use separate comment dicts in Block and Decay, and attach a multiline .comment attr to the returned/written dicts.

Later/maybe:

• Identify HERWIG decay matrix element to use in ISAWIG

• Handle RPV SUSY in ISAWIG