Particle Discovery Lab
Hogan, Julie
Documentation Activities External resource Education CMS CERN-LHC
Description
The Particle Discovery Lab uses CMS dimuon data from 2016 published via the CERN Open Data Portal. This intermediate-level lab exercise is designed to accompany an undergraduate course covering 20th century physics, including relativity and elementary particles.
Data from the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) experiment is provided in a format that can be quickly processed by students using either MATLAB or Python. No dedicated CMS Open Data software is required! Their task will be to “discover” a heavy particle that decays to two muons by reverse-engineering the properties of the short-lived particle from the observed muons. Students will build proficiency with: relativistic kinematics and energy conservation, Poisson-distributed data events, analysis using histograms, indistinguishable signal and background events, fitting and background subtraction, uncertainty propagation, and array-based programming and plotting
Instructor code is also provided in the "instructors" branch of the source repository, and includes instructions to build a new input dataset using the CMS Open Data software platforms.
Disclaimer
These open data are released under the MIT License.
Neither the experiment(s) ( CMS ) nor CERN endorse any works, scientific or otherwise, produced using these data.
