SEPTEMBER

2012-2013 I started off the year with looking at what I had done last year. This composed of looking through the different projects we did towards the end of the year along with some basic ideas of how the particle accelerator works at the beginning of the year. For the beginning project of the school year, I am going to try to find cosmic rays in the data sets that I am given. This is very important with finding out where there are inconsistencies with the data. To start off, a cosmic ray is a particle coming from "outerspace", or usually the sun. These billions of particles cascade all around the earth, hitting every part of it's surface. Cosmic Rays, or also known in the CMS as muons, come through the atmosphere and hit even us on their way to the ground. Cosmic Rays do not have enough momentum or energy to make it through the earth, and so they stop usually a good distance after hitting the ground. That is why the CMS detector is built underground in Geneva, Switzerland. When colliding particles in the Compact Muon Solenoid, scientists want to be as precise as possible. There are always parts of the accelerator that miss fire or stop working, but a huge problem that exists with looking at the colliding data are these muon solenoids. Even though the detector was built underground, they had to get it down through a hole. There is a collider (CMS) in the LHC (Large Hadron Collider) that lets in the Cosmic Rays. The data needs to be filtered because of this to take out Cosmic Rays. This is where the group comes in for deciding how to filter these Cosmic Rays out of the data set. Two big programs that are a big help to us are many eyes and excel. Excel can be used for filtering and looking at certain numbers in the data we are given, while Many Eyes can used for looking at certain plots.

One important program that I just used a week ago can be very useful for finding cosmic rays in the detector. This program looks very similar to Many Eyes, with some perks like seeing the graphs in 3d and being able to customize the data more to fit our needs. We can use this along with many eyes for a visual of the particles in the CMS detector.

Another project I started on for this year was looking at how to make a GUI in MATLAB. So far, I have used a few YOUTUBE videos to further my understanding of how it works. I am starting to make a graphing program that hopefully will be able to use the CMS data to find cosmic rays. My goal is to make this program more compatible for our needs than many eyes and even the program that was made over the summer. Some of my ideas was being able to filter data right from the program, instead of doing everything in excel and transferring it over to the website/program. The only difficulty I can see with this is that we are dealing with 100k events in just one data set, and that is before filtering. So I dont know if that will make the program overload with information. So far I am still making the layout for my program, so I have not got down to the nitty gritty. One other idea that would be very useful for this program would be being able to choose certain columns without downloading the entire data set. This would help out a lot with overloading the program, since we only want a couple of columns at the end of the data instead of the 11 or so columns in the data at the moment. I was also wondering if I could make my program capable of taking in all type of file sets (a.k.a. csv, and all the others that usually don't work with excel). If I can do this in my program, it can take out a lot of hassle for new comers who don't know exactly what all the file names mean. I am expecting tthis GUI to take a very long time, but I know from working with particle physics for a year now that it will be very helpful for people in the future starting off how I did.