Week+of+March+4+-+March+11

March 6
I arrived at Quarknet a little earlier today because of a doctor's appointment that I had, and began working at around 3:15. I thought that I would continue where I left off, and have noticed that I have not made it in for a while, as I was home sick on this past Monday.

Last week I raised a couple interesting questions about that data that I found in the scatterplots. With the lower massed particles that existed significantly lower than the rest of the data, I thought that it was interesting that they would be present given that most other parameters are consistent for cosmic rays. Today, I plan to look further at other parameters and hopefully I can make a connection among a few other interesting things. First I have some questions about momentum in this data.

Here is another graph that shows momentum (which is supposedly 0 in cosmic rays). By this scatterplot, the momentum sums are given on the x-axis. This graph completely seems to throw away the statement that the detector reads cosmic ray momentum as 0, as there is a negligible momentum sum for most every point on the plot. However looking at this graph, it completely contradicts what we have done in the past, as e/m = 1 has been present in many occasions, which would give this data primarily a value of 0, or at least close to 0. One thing that I think I should look into is 'what is a normal momentum value for partticles?' Maybe I would find that these values of psum represented in this plot are so small that they, in effect, are 0. With this, I have looked at other values momentum values of non-cosmic rays, and I feel that I ave found some helpful data. Although this other Man Eyes spreadsheet did not have the function of psum, I was able to look at momentum in all directions, and I started off with y. By this data, I found that it is normal for momentum of even the really small particles to range anywhere from -20 to 20, give or take a few. In the cosmic ray set, the momentum of this same parameter ranges generally from 0 to 3, give or take. This is very helpful to know, as I can now say that the momentum readings that are being picked up in my scatterplot of cosmic rays are just about negligible.