Designing an event display for the Transition Radiation Detector in ALICE

We document here a successful design study for an event display focused on the Transition Radiation Detector (TRD) within A Large Ion Collider Experiment (ALICE) at the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (CERN). Reviews of the fields of particle physics and visualisation are presented to motivate formally designing this display for two different audiences. We formulate a methodology, based on successful design studies in similar fields, that involves experimental physicists in the design process as domain experts. An iterative approach incorporating in-person interviews is used to define a series of visual components applying best practices from literature. Interactive event display prototypes are evaluated with potential users, and refined using elicited feedback. The primary artefact is a portable, functional, effective, validated event display – a series of case studies evaluate its use by both scientists and the general public. We further document use cases for, and hindrances preventing, the adoption of event displays, and propose novel data visualisations of experimental particle physics data. We also define a flexible intermediate JSON data format suitable for web-based displays, and a generic task to convert historical data to this format. This collection of artefacts can guide the design of future event displays. Our work makes the case for a greater use of high quality data visualisation in particle physics, across a broad spectrum of possible users, and provides a framework for the ongoing development of web-based event displays of TRD data.