CMS Data Camp Milestones

Fermilab: 14-18 July 2014

Work as a team to meet these milestones. The Level-3 project managers will visit your group to participate in brief milestone seminars after your team has completed the milestones in section B.

A. Building Blocks
At the formation of the team, each member can:

1. Use a spreadsheet or other appropriate tool to:
   • perform simple arithmetic on columns of numbers.
   • make meaningful data plots
   • create and interpret histograms
2. Make use of relativistic units that are common in particle physics.
3. Recognize that charge, energy and momentum are conserved in two-body decays both at rest and moving in the lab frame.

B. Foundations for Data Analysis
Completing these milestones gains the team access to the raw data. Each team member can:

1. Describe the particle your team is investigating, how it is produced and the decay mode that your trigger is sensitive to.
2. Explain what is measured in the trackers and calorimetry in CMS. Describe how these components measure these properties.
3. Describe the effect of a magnetic field on the trajectory of a charged particle.
4. Present and fully describe five screenshots of 3-D events during the milestone seminar.
5. Describe how to determine the mass of a particle given its energy and momentum.
6. If a particle is not at rest, explain how relativistic boost affects observed decay trajectories. Explain how plotting these trajectories in eta-phi space can help distinguish their "character."
7. Demonstrate how to determine the invariant mass of a moving particle (i.e. not at rest in the lab frame) by measuring its observable decay products.
8. Describe the information in each column of your data spreadsheets; also, identify which data are useable and which are not, and justify.

C. Data Analysis
Completing these milestones finishes the project.

1. Use the data tables to calculate the invariant mass of any particle.
2. Distinguish and enhance signal by removing background and applying cuts.
3. Fully describe both signal and background.
4. Create a final mass plot.
5. Fully describe the parent particle(s) in your data.
6. Define and investigate any additional milestones that the group finds necessary.