Week+of+February+11-+February+18

February 11
Today I arrived at Quarknet at 3:45 and after a bit of thought regarding the future, I have decided to continue working with cosmic rays, as I feel there is definitely a great deal more that we can find about this topic. Three areas of interest that I feel offer a good foundation for additional research include uploading a dataset including only cosmic rays into Man Eyes and looking for possible patterns or questions that may result, as well as looking for the reasons why the 40 GeV line exists the way that it does, and finally analyzing some cosmic ray events in the 3-D analyzing program that Dr. Loughran has shown me.

Many Eyes
I will take a data set that has been cut and upload it into Many Eyes. This will have all the cosmic rays that exist within the 100k data set. I hope to find additional leads to find places to explore. Here is the scatterplot that I was able to cut. I did not include within this plot the cut of mass, so it is clear that there is a bundle of tiny, light particles that continue to be present within this cosmic ray data. The graph is here:

40 GeV
As I described before, I would like to further study why the cosmic rays that we have isolated seem to have a mass above 40 GeV, as well as getting to the bottom of the mystery why there are so many particles also in this data that have a mass below 40 GeV, yet still are consistent with the other cuts.

3-D Animation
With this program, I can use the momentum of a particular event to create a 3-D visual display with a graphical representation. I feel that this can help us to see any possible consistencies that can point towards whether or not a particle is a cosmic ray. We can know if it is a cosmic ray by noticing where it enters and exits the detector, which will inevitably help us to conclude if the small particles below 20 GeV are cosmic rays or not. This will solidify a possible claim that 40 GeV is a required value for cosmic rays in the CMS detector, or if it simply a different consistency. Here is the tool that can be used: