Week+of+November+12+-+November+19

November 19
I decided to look further at the scatterplots of Excel. These scatterplots can give us a better representation of the data than ManyEyes because it allows us to better isolate data. To get the hang of this feature, I chose to graph from scatterplots. Here is one scatterplot I graphed. From this scatterplot, we can see that a similar scatterplot exists from the one we observed on Many Eyes. This includes even the Z boson at a value of 90 on the y-axis.

After this, I tried to graph the two columns of my created phi1 + phi2, against phi1, and it seems that this operation cannot be done. I keep getting an error message that looks like this:

With this message, I tried to reduce the number of values in each column to 255. When I did this, the scatterplot worked, but I feel like this information is drastically flawed, as it is leaving out over 3/4 of the remaining data. Here is what the plot looks like: I feel that this plot cannot give us much insight as to the nature of the plot of phi1+phi2 vs phi1. I would be interested in what it looks like, so maybe I should randomize the order, and hopefully get a more accurate representation. Here was my next graph: I am pleased with the results of what I did. To better view the data, I chose to extract the first 255 events, completely random, instead of taking the lowest 255 values of phi1+phi2 as I did previously. With this done, I still was able to get the values of phi1+phi2, but it was completely random instead of skewed. To get this result, I sorted from smallest to largest by Event Number, or, in other words, completely random data that happens to fall in a certain order.

Moving on from the phi data, I decided to look towards eta. What I found was that it is slightly more difficult to use, as it can fall within a specific range of values, whereas phi is limited to 1.57 OR -1.57. This makes it more exact when compared to Eta, about which cosmic rays fall BETWEEN .2 - -.2. Within a range, it is tough to extract particular data. Nevertheless, I chose to take the values of eta1 and sort it from smallest to greatest. From here, I extracted the data that fell between .24- -.24, and graphed it. Here is the plot I found: This graph is a pretty straight line as I would have guessed, but it is within this data that cosmic rays will linger.

Looking at this data, I have come to the conclusion that we need a function that can pull different quantities from separate columns, and isolate the data that contain all of the specified characteristics. For example, (I don't know if Excel is capable of this) we need to isolate the data points that have phi1+phi2 = 0, that ALSO contain an eta value between .2 and -.2, and that ALSO have a mass of greater than 40 GeV, which also have M=E. If a program is capable of doing this, then it would be quite simple to isolate each and every cosmic ray, as they will all have the parameters that are mentioned above.

When I was looking through the data, there were a few points that contained all of these qualities. I found them and was able to look at each column containing all the parameters I listed above, and there were points that followed the cosmic ray characteristics textbook. With (E1 +E2)/M = 1.00006, and phi1+phi2= -.08, and a mass of 73.504, this particle is surely a cosmic ray. It follows each and every prerequisite given, thus is almost certainly a cosmic ray. If we can have a program that could do this for every point, it would be easy to take out all the cosmic rays.