Enhancing the Plotting Functionality in MCnet/Rivet

Rivet is a tool used by particle physicists to test and develop Monte Carlo event generators, i.e., simulation of particle accelerator collisions. Simulations are crucial for particle physics research, since they can be used to compare theoretical predictions with experimental measurements to discover new physics.

Visualizing the output is a fundamental part of Rivet, as a good visualization makes it intuitive and easy to understand the results. Currently, plots are created by generating and compiling LaTeX commands. While this method does create high-quality plots, it can be slow, have memory issues, be sensitive to the deployment platform.

The goal of this project is to solve the above mentioned issues by replacing the LaTeX plotting backend with a new high-level API that can support multiple rendering backends. The API should make it easy to export high-quality plots, while still allowing full customization for advanced users. Matplotlib will become the first rendering backend that will be added to this API, and options for exporting figures into interactive plots in the browser will also be investigated.