November+26-December+2

I was sick for the first half of this week, so I had some catching up to do. Jason filled me in on the work that he and Jeremiah had begun on Monday: they were given a partially incomplete set of data--this time with 100,000 events--and were responsible for completing the data before sorting this set. With his instruction and assistance, i did the same; I copied and pasted the missing column titles into the new sheet from our prior data sets, then inserted the functions for the columns. These columns have not yet been dragged down to include all 100,000 events. I am hoping that there is an easier way to complete this than manually dragging. Below is an image that shows some of the completed columns and some of the new additions (not yet applied to all events).

After much tinkering (and the assistance of Dr. L) we found that that by selecting one cell, then pressing the shift key, then pressing another cell selects all the cells in-between. By selecting all of the empty cells (and including the cell with each column's original function), I used the edit-fill down commands to apply all the calculations. The computer did well over 1 million calculations in about a minute!

This is an example of a big group of Excel cells all selected and filled by means of the process described above.

Now that we have our completed set of data, we can begin sorting in hopes of narrowing down cosmic rays. I first sorted by the (E1+E2)/M column. As described previously, we would expect that the cosmic rays' value for this column would be 1. Because it is read as dimuon, the momentum of the two "separate" particles (1 and 2) would be read as having equal and opposite momentums. Because E^2=M^2+P^2, when momentum is 0, M=E, so (E1+E2)/M should be 1.

When I sorted by this column (lowest to highest), there were almost 70 events that produced the number 1 exactly, and several more that were less than 1/100,000 away from 1. I did a quick scatter plot of the first 2000 events (when sorted) to see if there was a distinct pattern among the events, and there was a distinct point of inflection that distinguished the particles that possessed a value of about 1 from the trend of the other particles.