Week+of+December+17+-+December+24

December 17
Today I arrived at Quarknet at 3:35 and plan to begin working with the new Man Eyes plot that I made. I will show this plot to Grace and Jeremiah so they can work with me in trying to conclude what that cluster of small particles means on the Mass vs Energy plot, and I also would like to make another ManyEyes that tries to cut out those smaller-massed particles that do not satisfy all cosmic ray requirements. This is a helpful graph in looking at these particles that don't seem to belong. For starters, their mass is below 40 GeV, which immediately raises a red flag. Futhermore, these particles are much more loosely correlated between energy and mass than all the others. Because of this, I think that it is easily determined that these particles may be cut from the data. Based on the past research, the fact that their masses are below 40 immediately shows us that these are not cosmic rays. They simply have a close correlation between the energy and mass, meaning they have a very very small momentum, but they do not satisfy what we are looking for. Now I will cut these points from the set. I am making a new Many Eyes scatterplot now that I have sorted the data an cut the points with a mass below 40. I am confident this will improve our cutting process. Here is the same graph of the one above, with the highlighted particles now cut: Now all the data that we see has a mass in the cosmic ray range, with essentially no particles that deviate from the E/M guidelines. Even the largest variation is still quite minute and may even be accounted for by error in measurement. Another graph that helps us to see this is the graph of E vs M. If I assert that all of these are cosmic rays, then this should be a straight line at y=x starting at 40 GeV. Here it is: Once I had done this, Dr. Loughran explained the nature of the mass readings. Because all of the cosmic rays are muons, they will all have the same mass. Thus, the differences in mass are actually differences in momentum. With this knowledge, I am curious as to why there is a large cutoff at 40 GeV. This must mean that there is a guideline in momentum, not allowing the "mass" recording to exceed a certain point. Additionally, I am now confused as to whether or not I was justified in making my most previous cut, eliminating data that was below a mass recording of 40. If the masses are all the same, then it was actually a momentum difference that I was seeing.