December+10-December+16

December 10 Today, I arrived at 3:30 and began to make cuts in the 100k dimuon set of data. Based on our findings from last week that, when sorted by E/M, the cosmic rays tend to be concentrated in the first 1055 events (seen in the eta and phi graphs in particular), I copied and pasted the data in the first 1055 rows and copied them into a new spreadsheet. This cut is based on the trends seen in the eta1+eta2 and phi1+phi2 graphs that Jason and I studied last week. This first cut accounts for 3 criteria: E/M, phi1, and eta. The data was sorted by E/M, so all of the data that was included in this cut meets the expectation that E/M be about 1. Recalling our research from last week, the first 1055 rows of data include the events that, when graphed, showed a trend different than the rest of the events considering eta and phi. These events meet our paramaters for eta and phi.

This new set of data, narrowed down to the collection in which we have seen trends of cosmic rays, will allow me to narrow my search. My next move is to sort the data based on mass, recalling that cosmic rays tend to be around 40 GeV.

When I created a scatter plot of these events' masses, I noticed an interesting pattern in the first several events. Before the scatter plot assumes a fairly linear trend with a slope of about 1/20, there is a collection of dots with a significantly steeper slope. These are all below 40 GeV, at which point the slope changes.

December 14
Today, I created an account in ManyEyes in order to view and manipulate data that I upload. Creating the account was straightforward and simple, and the upload of data, despite being pretty time consuming, was successful. I chose to upload the 1055 events that we had narrowed down over the past few weeks. Hopefully, using ManyEyes as a new medium will allow me to view the data differently in order to make more precise cuts and draw more well-backed conclusions. Here is a picture of the data once it was uploaded onto ManyEyes:



Unfortunately, the school-issued MacBooks prevent me from downloading Java in order to view the data as scatterplots. For this, I will have to switch computers.