Preamble

À une vache près, hein, c’est pas une science exacte..

Karadoc (Jean-Christophe Hembert), Kaamelott, Livre II, épisode “Sept cent quarante-quatre”, écrit par Alexandre Astier.

Thanks and acknowledgments

There are many people to thank for their help, support and contribution, (in diverse ways) to the work presented here.

A big thank you to Maëlle Kerveno and Philippe Dessagne who welcomed me in the DNR (at the time Grace) team in 2013. Since then, they have always been pushing me forward, encouraging me to aim for higher quality results and never settle for the simple “it works”. They were very helpful in the preparation of this manuscript.

At their side, I can thank the postdocs and students that spent some time in the team and brought new ideas and challenges. In particular Antoine Bacquias, Eliot Party, François Claeys.

Thank you to all the members of the formal and informal collaborations we are part of: Marc Dupuis, Stephane Hilaire, Pascal Romain, Cyrille de Saint Jean, David Bernard, Gilles Noguere, Catalin Borcea, Andu Negret, Adina Olacel, Marian Boromiza, Arjan Plompen, Carlos Paradela Dobarro, Markus Nyman, Roberto Capote, Toshihiko Kawano.

I owe a big thank you to the laboratory directors (C. Roy, R. Barillon and S. Courtin) and associate directors for their support to the DNR group and my many activities in the lab. Special thanks to Sandrine Courtin and Gilbert Duchene, who, at an Agata@Ganil workshop in February 2013, informed me of a possible position opening in IPHC, and by that led me to where I am today. My most sincere gratitude to the administrative and technical staff at IPHC, they are our partners in research, and we could not do much without you.

Thank you to Arnd Junghans, Emmeric Dupont, Nicolas Arbor for agreeing to be reviewer of my manuscript, and to Anne Ruimy and Sandrine Courtin for also being part of the jury.

Thank you to Noemie Cobolet, Aurelie Hourlier-Fargette, Stephanie Cheviron, and all the other members of the University Library, IT and Data services, who helped me and became partners in my evolution from an Open Science curious observer into a dedicated actor. Without them, the Open Science part of this manuscript would not be more than an anecdotal paragraph in the appendix [1]. Thank you to Noémie and Stéphanie Cheviron for their help in writing the OS chapter.

A subtle thanks to JP, Marie, Nicolas, Momo, … companions of many coffee breaks and unofficial support group for Notilus/Goelett users.

Thanks to all the people who helped me write and correct this manuscript, give them credit for everything that is right. For the stuff that’s wrong, I take the blame.

Last but certainly not least, thank you to Corinne and Valentin for their support, accepting my absences during my many work trips over the years, as well as the necessary work sessions at home, after dinner and during the weekends.

Foreword

by the author.

It took me some time to start writing this HDR manuscript, for the simple reasons that I was unsure of what to put in it. The physics done in the DNR group is already well explained in past articles and thesis manuscripts, and even more in Maëlle Kerveno’s own HDR [2], it would have been pointless to repeat it.

After some soul-searching, I finally realized that I could write about my obsessions what I focus on in my work: producing uncertainties, using the Monte-Carlo method, and writing reliable analysis code. Additionally, I will take this manuscript as an opportunity to write about methods, work organization, and Open Science. These are topics of great interest for me and work well together: publishing in Open Access and Open Source requires specific methods and structure in the work, …

This manuscript will therefore be somewhat unusual (compared to most of the HDRs), in tone and in content. If a thesis manuscript is a scientific document with cold hard description of facts and methods, I intend to make this paper one with personality. There are not a lot of opportunities in a scientist career to put “on the records“ some methods and reflection on what one thinks is a good way to do things. Still, it won’t be an opinion piece. The methods and works presented here will not necessarily be truths universally acknowledged, but you’ll find in these pages statements that hold true in the particular cases discussed. However, they may not be the only valid ones.

The physics (producing inelastic neutron scattering on ¹⁸³W) is a support for the description of the Monte-Carlo method as well as code writing strategy. Indeed, one important point to take away is that the code cannot be considered anymore as a black box that magically turn data recorded with a well characterized setup into detailed experimental result. It is as much part of the process as the detectors and should be described and tested with the same degree of care.

Moreover, it is much more than a simple PDF file [3] with text and figure. True to my focus on Open Science and Open Source, the whole document, as well as any associated scripts, and codes used or referred to in the text, will be made available.

The main part of the document (from “Context and motivation“ to “Results and discussions“) is sequential, but the Open Science or Management chapters, as well as the sections in the appendix, can be read independently. The text is rich in hyperlinks connecting sections together. Don’t hesitate to click and Rabbit-hole your way into the topics.

Footnotes