Week+of+November+19+-+November+26

I arrived at Quarknet at 3:45 today and began immediately working on our excel pages. We talked with Dr. Loughran for a little, then began to work on isolating our data. Here is what we first did. This was our first cut: For this spreadsheet, we decided to first cut out the data that did not follow with the phi1+phi2 = 0 hypothesis. Also, to make this cut, we had to decide how precise we were going to make this value due to error in measurement and the slightest variation in the path or angle of entrance of the particle. Thus, we decided to cut the data at -.5 to .5, give or take a few values. This is what we were left with. Next, we will continue to cut the data with the next parameters we have decided. The next cut we chose to perform is the cut that eliminates any particles that do not have a mass over 40 GeV. We have looked at many plots with cosmic rays and have decided that they contain masses over 40 GeV, such as the graph of Esum vs. Mass. The linear line of different particles began specifically at 40. Thus, any particles with lower values must go. However, we were left with just four events in our set. Here is the result of our second cut: All of the four previous data events have masses greater than 40 GeV, but with just four results, it is easy to see if they work with the next cut. The next cut we will be making is to make sure that each cosmic ray has a (Esum)/M value of approximately 1.0, as momentum is equal to 0 in the machine, E/M should give us a value of 1. Looking up above, the top data point has an (E1 + E2)/M value of 1.77, which is quite further from 1 than the resulting three. Because of this, I feel that this particle is not a cosmic ray. Also, I looked over at that particle's Eta value, and noticed that it does not fall within the -.2 - .2 range that we also determined, whereas all other particles fall well within this range. Because of these factors, I feel we can cut out this particular particle.

From all the work that we have done, we can conclude that these particles are cosmic rays because they are textbook cosmic rays in each category. They have not deviated from any parameters, so we can be almost certain in our predictions. However, though these are almost surely cosmic rays, there are most likely more comic rays that are not included in this data set, as our cuts were generally strict. It is likely that cosmic rays have emerged at differing values from unforeseen factors which would have caused us to cut them out of the data. I am fairly happy with the results that I have obtained, and I am confident that the events shown above are cosmic rays.