Week+of+Mar+17


 * __March 17, 2008__**

Friday was the MasterClass at Notre Dame's Jordan Hall. First we heard a lecture about the Higgs Field, but only caught the very end of the presentation. Next we had a quick tour of Jordan Hall, and saw the new building. After the tour we heard a lecture by Dr. Dan Karmguard, which was basically an introduction to what we would be doing with the Z particle decays. The Z particle has four main decay patterns, quark quark, tau tau, electron positron, and muon muon. He first explained the quark quark decay, which is when the Z particle decays into quarks which in turn deposits their energy in H-Cal. The quark quark decay is by far the most common Z particle decay. Next there was the muon muon decay, which is when the Z particle decays into a muon and antimuon (to conserve charge), flys off in opposite directions (to conserve momentum), and deposits some energy in the Muon Detector and is still able to escape the detector. The electron positron is the third type of decay, which is where the Z particle splits into a electron positron pair (to conserve charge), flys in opposite directions (to conserve momentum), and deposits in E-Cal. Last was the notorious tau tau decay. This one is tricky since it many times mimics the same decay as other decays. There is a few differences, when a Z decays into a tau, the tau decays almost instantly after the Z. The tau decays into other particles such as quarks and other leptons. The one thing that gives away tau decays are the low energy they have due to neutrinos that are created in the decay, and can not be detected by the particle detector. These are all the decay modes of the Z particle and was the basis for our trip to Jordan Hall. Using our knowledge of the particle decays of the Z particle we had to classify Z particle decays from data like the links above.


 * __March 18, 2008__**

Today I didn't get to do much as the whole class engaged in a discussion about the most recent class project. Each member of our class was assigned a month and year to look up earthquakes during that month. Once we find the earthquakes we are to find if LIGO sensed them by calculationg the speed of S and P waves, and the distance between LIGO and the earthquake. Once we have confirmed that LIGO has "felt" an earthquake we are to make a map on Google Earth, marking all the earthquakes "felt" by LIGO. After each of us has created our Google Maps we will combine them, showing the distribution of earthquakes.


 * __March 19, 2008__**

Today we further expanded on our discussion of the LIGO project that we are to work on through out the week. Nothing new was really said and I looked at some of the tools given to us to complete this new project. Google Earth is a familiar tool that we have used before, we can search for anything all over the world, and somethings in space as well. Next there is Bluestone which gives us data from LIGO, allowing us to identify if LIGO has "felt" an earthquake. Finally there was the website http://www.ncedc.org/maps/, a site where we could plug in certain search parameters and find all earthquakes with in a certain date.

__**March 20, 2008**__

Today I played around with the Bluestone program a little. I was familiarizing myself with the program, to prepare me for my LIGO project that I need to complete. Playing around with the variables, putting in different times to look at, I once again felt that I could use Bluestone exceptionally well again and that I could get started on my dataset and begin looking to see what earthquakes LIGO "felt" during September 2006.