Consider expanding the trigger rate tool to provide the rate for individual telescopes

[VictorBarbosaMartins]

It might be interesting to have the individual telescope rates also estimated when passing a simtel file to the tool. At the moment, the tool calculates the trigger rate for the entire array used in the simulation.

However, to implement that:

• one would need to work directly with the data of the telescopes from the simtel file. Konrad suggested using the extract_simtel.c tool (from hessio/hess) to select the IDs os the telescopes needed for the subarray (in case of a single telescope then a single ID). The original names of the telescopes are lost on the way, as the new names change;
• This would be only possible for .simtel files (not hdata files)
• extract_simtel.c is a tool per se (>2k C++ code) and not belonging to the simtel_array package;

For the sake of simplicity, I would prefer to keep the simtools trigger rate tool as it is and derive the trigger rate only for the array as used for the simulation, without having to dig in in the simtel file. If we need the individual telescope rates, then we should simulate individual telescopes and use these output simtel files instead. What do you think? @GernotMaier @orelgueta

[GernotMaier]

Wait - this was the intention from the beginning: to allow calculation of trigger rates per telescope (for MSTs/SSTs; for LSTs we need to use an array because of the hardware trigger). The single telescope trigger rate is the important number.

Note also that typical bias curves (trigger rate vs trigger thresholds) are for single telescopes and are an important validation step for the simulations.

How many events are need to simulate this specifically (without using prodN files)?

[VictorBarbosaMartins]

We continued some discussion in this regard in #1007.

I believe that the simulate_showers_for_trigger_rates application offers a good solution for providing single telescope simulations for estimating the trigger rate. Hence, we do not necessarily need a tool to access the trigger rate of individual telescopes out of a broader (full array) simulation.

With ~ 30 min simulation time (on my laptop) we are able to simulate 1e5 protons and estimate the trigger rate for an MST with an estimated 10% statistical uncertainty (see #1007).