Looking+at+the+new+program+for+the+data+set

3/28/12

ETA When we looked at the new program today of the events, we decided to look at the Z and W particles and how they were similar or different. I chose to work with Eta and to compare the data. When we looked, we realized that between the two, the data was fairly flat and that there wasn't a big difference in the data sets. There was one big difference though, and that would be twin peaks around -.5. After looking at it for a while we concluded that there was probably a malfunction in the detector, and not particles because after looking for a straight line for muons (eta1 and eta2) we saw that there wasn't any relationship. This shows me how the detector can sometimes trigger, and that not everything the data says can be right because particles are not the only thing that can make the detector go off. There was a dome shape in one, but we decided that if we had more data the graph would even out into a flat plane because the particles coming out of the collision don't have a certain way of colliding. This is W, showing a mostly flat line, which is what we expect

This shows the dome shape that was mentioned, and when seeing this we decided to take a look at the next graph to see if the detector was sensing cosmic rays.

This shows that there aren't any cosmic rays.

4/18/12 For this week were are looking at the differences between muons and electrons in the Z particles. We already found out the differences between the Z and W particle above by looking at the same Values, but now we wanted to see how the the same particle would show the same values with either a muon or an electron.

Here, we looked at the Z particle with eta1, and I saw a big difference between the electron and the muon: Here we see that there is a curve in the data, with most of the data being in the middle close to the center, even though the biggest peak is at -.5 (still close to the center). This is a large difference compared to the next graph (below).

This graph is a big difference because the data is displayed evenly throughout the graph. This shows that we have different parts of the detector to look at different things, and also that you want a random assortment of hits everywhere in the detector. This is because when two particles collide, they go in opposite ways, and the particles flying out of the collision are random and fly everywhere. Therefore, we cannot just see a trend happening in one area of the graph. Going back into some of the earlier projects we did this year, we used the graphs to see if we had cosmic rays. These muons going through the top of the CMS showed us that when there was a large amount of activity in the top of the detector, that it wasn't just a bunch of random events. It was actually muons coming down from space!

For the last couple of weeks, we have been toying around with some of the new programs for histograms and scatterplots. These helpful tools can get us a deeper understanding of how the particles move around in the detector after they have collided. An example of this would be from the graphs above, seeing the difference between the muons and electrons, and the Z and W particle. These gadgets expand our knowledge for what is happening on a microscopic level.