Week+of+October+1+-+October+8

I contributed the following to the page on the e-Lab histograms:

At Quarknet Wednesday, John illustrated the logic behind where to cut the histograms in order to isolate the cosmic rays when looking at the histograms. I went through the data settings and displayed the data for the muons measured in Mass, Eta, and Phi. Looking first at Eta, because the bin width was originally set to 10, I figured that it would be better to decrease the bin width to a much smaller value to get more precise readings. After lowering the bin width to around .1 instead of ten, I was able to see many more precise readings of data. Also, because cosmic rays enter the detector from almost straight overhead, I cut the graph to eliminate the other data that would not likely contain cosmic rays. As I found in the graphs above on ManyEyes, cosmic rays gather around -.2 to .2. Because of this, I cut the graph to focus only on this region. The histogram that I was able to configure is shown below. Notice that there are a great deal of particles that are observable in this range. It is here that cosmic rays are observable using Eta on a histogram. Next, John explained to us more in depth on the bin width. Adjusting the bin width basically just shows how precise the histogram will display the data. By changing the bin width to a smaller value, it will create a separate bar in increments at that value. This helped me to understand much more how to manipulate the graphs. The next histogram I looked at was Phi. This histogram further shows the evidence for the cosmic rays in the data. Like in Eta, the graphs on ManyEyes are consistent to the histograms that we see here. The cosmic rays gather around a Phi value of 1.57, which makes sense, as this is pi/2, or essentially straight overhead. Looking at the graph for Phi, there were two noticeable peaks. These peaks occurred at 1.57 and -1.57. This means that the points at this moment are probably cosmic rays, entering straight through the detector. After I found these consistencies in observations, I looked at the histogram of the mass. There were a few noticeable points about the graph. When I looked at ManyEyes and learned to highlight the points, I determined that there were patterns at a mass of 40 GeV. In the histogram, there is a separation between the particles. The cosmic rays begin at 40 GeV, and the lower mass particles that are meant to take place in the detector all have scattered, lower masses under 30. This points to the notion that the cosmic rays have masses greater than 40 GeV, as confirmed earlier in ManyEyes.