Week+of+November+5+-+November+12

November 5
I returned today to South Bend from a trip to Fort Wayne for Vocations class at around 4 o'clock, where I planned to head straight over to Quarknet. After I found that nobody else was going, I decided to head home, as I understand that we are to move on to the Excel work that we are beginning, and I have no means to begin work.

November 7
Today, the entire group arrived at Quarknet. I arrived at 3:35, and began to work with the other people in the group on commenting and reading over everyone else's graphs. I left a few comments on Jeremiah's and Grace's logbooks. Furthermore, we have been awaiting the explanation of our next project, as we are about ready to continue forth with manipulating Excel spreadsheets. After a great deal of learning, I left at 5:45.

As we were introduced to Excel, we found out how to sort by going to Data --> Sort then clicking around to find the right parameters. Sorting essentially orders each row in an order specified by the parameters chosen. After playing around and getting comfortable with the sorting, we chose to include an extra column of data. We made a column called (E1+E2)/m, which performs that calculation for each cell. This then was able to be done for the rest of the data in the column. Now we have a column that will show this calculation that is significant in isolating cosmic ray data. This is true because cosmic rays have a momentum recorded as 0 in the machine, which means that E/m should be 1. This, however, due to error, makes it difficult to identify the cosmic rays because it is difficult to decide where to draw the line, such as 1.1 or maybe 1.4? Many values of one exist, so how close to 1 must a cosmic ray be? Other data calculations can also be performed. I was brainstorming some values that we know of cosmic rays, and decided to think about phi. I will seek to possibly make a column of phi1 + phi2, and all the values that equal 0 (as it should be 1.57+-1.57) for cosmic rays would be significant. This would be another way of isolating cosmic ray data. Here is a picture of the data that I have completed thus far, without the new column of phi1+phi2. I will perform this calculation shortly.

Here is my newest addition. I added in the column with parameters phi1+phi2, in search of the values that result in a value of 0. This is the range that cosmic rays will exist in, as they enter at 1.57, and exit at -1.57, meaning that, if added, the result should yield 0.

But notice that I sorted it from lowest to highest. There are many negative values, so it does not put the cosmic rays at the top. Instead, they are in the middle of the data set, around the 450-550 row range. The next image is where the values of this column reach zero.

Once I finished adding the newest column, I decided to experiment with some Excel Scatterplots. I chose to begin with a scatterplot that I previously have done, so I started with graphing Esum and Mass. Fortunately, I found a plot similar to the one on ManyEyes. With this tool, we can further make new plots with any parameters that we choose, giving us larger range than ManyEyes gives us. Here is the image of the scatterplot I created:

We can notice the infamous linear arrangement after the mass values of 40 GeV, just like I described on the ManyEyes plot. This is a very good sign for the outlook of our data analysis.