Get the Delphes tar file: wget http://cp3.irmp.ucl.ac.be/downloads/Delphes-3.4.1.tar.gz Add the following lines to your .bashrc file in your home directory: export ROOTSYS=/usr/local/cernroot/rootv5.34/root export PATH=$PATH:$ROOTSYS/bin export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$ROOTSYS/lib:$LD_LIBRARY_PATH export LD_LIBRARY_PATH=$LD_LIBRARY_PATH:$ROOTSYS/lib:$PYTHONDIR/lib:/opt/rh/python27/root/usr/lib64 Then "source .bashrc" so your shell knows where to find Root, and unpack: tar -xvzf Delphes-3.4.1.tar.gz Now cd to the delphes directory and make (it takes several minutes): cd Delphes-3.4.1 make While that's making (or if it's already made), go to your MG5_aMC@NLO directory and open up a script to generate pp->ttbar: cd /home/potter/MG5_aMC_v2_6_1 emacs lhc_pptottbar.dat & In this put some lines like (set lpp1,2=1 means proton pdfs): import model sm generate p p > t t~ output lhc_pptottbar launch shower=Pythia8 set lpp1 1 set lpp2 1 set ebeam1 6500 set ebeam2 6500 set nevents 100 set iseed 1 So now we're going to generate 100 pp->ttbar events with MG5, which then asks Pythia8 to decay and hadronize the tops: ./bin/mg5_aMC lhc_pptottbar.dat That should take about a minute. Now cd to the output directory: cd lhc_pptottbar/ ls You should see a whole bunch of stuff related to the event generation. Lets look for the file Delphes needs: cd Events/run_01/ ls gunzip tag_1_pythia8_events.hepmc.gz Since MG5 automatically compresses the .hepmc file, we need to uncompress it before giving it to Delphes. Now move the .hepmc file to your Delphes directory and go there too: mv tag_1_pythia8_events.hepmc /home/potter/Delphes-3.4.1 cd /home/potter/Delphes-3.4.1 We're now ready to run Delphes on our small ttbar event file. Let's use the ATLAS detector model in cards/delphes_card_ATLAS.tcl (scroll through this file later to see what it is doing!): ./DelphesHepMC cards/delphes_card_ATLAS.tcl ttbar.root tag_1_pythia8_events.hepmc all in one line. That should take about five seconds to do 100 events. Full simulation would take an hour or more. Now view the file in Root: root -l ttbar.root root [1] TBrowser b Scroll through and enjoy plots for electrons, muons, jets, missing ET and a whole bunch of other stuff we'll talk about later!