Final Exam+Project

__ Summary of 1st Semester Research __

This has been a semester of great leaps forward. I began this semester with very little experience or knowledge with the concept of cosmic rays. Sure I had heard the name before but I had never taken the time to actually understand what they were. I began my work this semester with simple tasks of reading online articles and writing short summaries about them. Once I learned about what a cosmic ray actually was, I began using the CMS detector to look at individual cosmic ray recorded events found at this website, [].



Once I had a good understanding of the CMS tool, I began looking at the program of Many Eyes, [], found at this URL. This is where a majority of time was spent while working on cosmic rays I believe. I would look at different data inputs and different visualizations, and describe what I found. At one point in the semester we had to do a project in which we looked at 10 graphs and described them, found here https://sjhsrc.wikispaces.com/Thursday+October+18th%2C+2012 These are some many eyes graphs which I viewed this semester. The image below is a graph of Y-Axis phi1 and X-Axis M with a dot size of M. The graph is a jumbled mess when looking from an uneducated standpoint, but it really shows a lot about cosmic rays. When looking near the bottom of the graph, a grouping of events can be seen jutting outwards with high mass. This area is an area that could be a cosmic ray due to the high mass and the fact that it comes into visibility at around 40 GeV.

"This graph is a key piece of information. This graph shows the a clear verticle line of events, going far above 40 GeV. I believe this graph gives clear evidence on the subject of cosmic rays. It has a full line emerging from around 0.0 on the x-axis px sum parent rest frame and extends to 106 on the y-axis E sum parent rest frame. The mass of the line of events shown increases in each event starting with at 40 GeV the mass of 39.6, then the farthest recorded event." This quote from an earlier post of mine, is describing the graph below. Quote found here. https://sjhsrc.wikispaces.com/Thursday+October+18th%2C+2012



After doing these things I began work on an excel spreadsheet document containing 100 thousand events detected in the LHC at CERN. We began to cut the data in order to find the events with the most similarities to cosmic rays. This was an extremely large file and the cuts we did allowed the size to shrink dramatically. These were some of the solutions to the equations that were inputted into the excel file. These numbers were only a small portion of the work done in the file. We administered many cuts to the page not shown in this image, as this is an image taken early in the work we have done in the excel file. With all these things in mind it is time to present some final data.

__Final Project__ I first decided to add the (Q1+Q2)-1 parameter to my data. This will allow me to see the charge of the particles as a negative, because Z particles have both positive and negative charges. After inputting the data into excel, I opened many eyes and I copy and pasted all the data I received. The image below is of the excel file with the given parameters we have worked on.

The next image is of Y-Axis E1 X-Axis (Q1+Q2)-1 with a dot size of M. This graph shows three columns of event data from the cut data put in many eyes. The two outer columns represent smaller, less significant data. The column in the center contains what could be a cosmic ray. The data in it goes to just under 60 E. This shows what could be a cosmic ray due to the fact that cosmic rays only appear at around 40 GeV. With this knowledge we can tell that because the data is in the negative range and containing data that exceeds 40 GeV with increasing mass, we could have strong evidence for a cosmic ray. The next image is of Y-Axis (Q1+Q2)-1 X-Axis (Q1+Q2)-1 with a dot size of M. This graph shows three individual points. The middle point has the largest mass as seen below. When comparing this to other graphs, this graph has me to believe that it is looking down upon the columns seen in the graph above, in sort of a birds eye view manner. We see that the farthest dot to the left has the smallest mass of the three dots, and when compared to the graph above, it is the same column due to the same dot size at the top of the column. This is the same for the dot in the top right of the image. This dot closely resembles the column in the graph above. The image below is of Y-Axis M with X-Axis (Q1+Q2)-1 and a Dot size of M. This graph resembles the three columns shown in the first graph on this page. The difference in this graph is that the columns shown all go much higher than the first. More events are encompassed in this image than in the first graph image. As shown in this image the particles above 40 GeV in the middle column have a much higher mass than the other columns particles. All three columns are similar until it reaches 40 GeV, and at that point the middle column begins to show signs of a cosmic ray. It has very high mass, in a negative area, and because cosmic rays pass through the cosmic ray, you will get a positive and a negative event. In a way the CMS detector is tricked because while it picks up the events, it does not know that it is one continuous event and that it has a very large momentum. The CMS detector believes that the cosmic ray does not actually have momentum. This is why you must isolate one side of the data so that it can be properly viewed. The graph below accurately depicts the way in which we can find cosmic rays. In conclusion, I believe that the data we have looked at and cut into multiple segments gives us the the ability to judge what we have been working on and learning about all semester. I believe that in this data we have enough proof to say that we have found cosmic rays, due to their high mass, their appearance above 40 GeV, and the commonness that we have seen them in the data sets we have been given.