Week+of+November+26+-+December+3

November 26
Today Jeremiah and I arrived at Quarknet at 3:30. With Dr. Loughran's instruction, we began to work with a new dataset that contained ten thousand events instead of just one thousand. With this, by statistics, we should find a better representation of data. Although this new dataset is larger, it is corrupted, and is missing some columns. To fix this, we inserted all the missing columns that we copied and pasted from our other excel sheets. This new sheet also needs to insert the functions, as they are not translated when copied to another document. This is difficult because I cannot find the way to easily select the column to fill down without having to drag through 10,000 events. This is time consuming, but I feel that it is necessary because I cannot find out how to do it efficiently. After a great deal of copying and pasting, and finding and fixing errors, Jeremiah and I were able to complete the excel sheet with all the new functions and 10,000 events. This took a large amount of troubleshooting and figuring out the Excel methodology. Here is the image of the modified spreadsheet. It is impossible to ignore the columns that have #NUM! marked, and it makes me wonder why this is the case. If the formula works for some of the rows, I do not know why this won't work for the rest. This can be found later, and I hope that this can be fixed. As the data sheet does not have 100,000 events like had been thought, Dr. Loughran is trying to obtain the right document that has all of these events and information. WIth the newer spreadsheet, we will have a vastly greater number of events to record and analyze.

November 28
I arrived at Quarknet today at 3:45 and began to work with the new spreadsheet with 100,000 events. During study hall today in school I was able to complete finishing the columns that were lacking, but I have yet to figure out how to fill down. This is because the formula does not start from row 1, and instead begins at row 2, where I have input the formulas. With the newly imported formulas, I cannot get them to finish filling in starting from row 2. I see the Fill Down function in the Edit pull down, but cannot use this until I find how to select an entire column, minus row 1. With Dr. Loughran's help, we found a quicker way to fill an entire column. This involved highlighting the bottom row first then shift+Row2. Then we can use the Fill--> Down function to finish the column. Once I have done this, our 100,000 event Excel spreadsheet is finished, which I will email to Jeremiah when he returns. Here is an image of the latter half of the columns of the finished spreadsheet: Next, I am going to sort this spreadsheet to try to isolate cosmic rays. This will be difficult because there will of course be values that are challenging to distinguish no matter how we decide to sort it. Basically, if our target is 1, and we have values ranging from.905- 1.48..... where is the line drawn? I decided to begin by sorting from the E/M column, where cosmic rays should lie within the range of 1. Here is the top part of the sort. Next I will try to formulate a scatter plot that will show some evidence as to where the cosmics may be. I graphed both the columns of mass an energy, and I have found some evidence of cosmic rays in this graph. I chose to take the first 18,000 events because it will give me a range of data with both cosmic rays and not cosmic rays, where we can see a difference between the two. The graph that I found points toward this notion. In this graph, the cosmic rays will lie on the line y=x. There is a clear trend on this line, giving evidence for cosmics. They will be on this line because of the formula e^2=m^2 + p^2, where p=0 for cosmic rays, thus m=e, and y=x. Furthermore, we can see that this form of isolation works because of the clear display of events that have drifted from this line. The particles that drift from this line, which in this case, above the line, are getting further away from being considered cosmic rays. With 18,000 events, it is obvious that there are many non-cosmic rays. I now decided to graph phi1, which aas we know, cosmic rays will make a peak at 1.57 and -1.57. I we see trends at this point, we can see they are cosmic rays. Clearly there is a trend at the expected values. This was taken from the first 2000 events, and this plot really helps us to see about how many cosmic rays there may be. It loses its trend at about 1100 events, so now I will make the same graph, but include only the first 1100 events. With this done, I found that 1100 was just slightly large, with points lying scattered about, so I continued to shave off events until it reached a clear pattern. I stopped at 1055, thus I would predict there to be roughly 1055 cosmic ray contenders in this cut. Here, there are trends in the areas we like to see, which would call for good grounds to make a cut of this section, then continue to work with more cuts when we decide what part we would like to manipulate next.