Hi, Seth here. Amidst the fun of moving and looking for apartments, I’ve also been working more than full time looking at our first collisions and preparing for more. In this entry, I’d like to share with you the very first plot I tried to make from actual collision data.
Before I continue, though, I should apologize to all my collaborators on the ATLAS experiment if the title of this post gave them a heart attack: sorry, guys and gals. Why would the title do that? Well, being a member of the ATLAS collaboration means agreeing to present our results collectively; that means that anything I learn about our collision data will only be publicly available after everyone’s had a chance to look at it and make sure it’s work they can stand behind. That’s only fair; after all, everyone contributed to the results; the plots I make are only the final few steps in a chain of design, construction and commissioning more than half as old as I am! (I’ve written about what we can and can’t blog about before.)
So why am I saying I can show you a plot? Well, take a look:
No jets here!
See the problem? It’s empty. What it claims to show is that I looked at 500 events and saw exactly zero track jets in every single one. But actually I had something set wrong when I made it, so it doesn’t really tell you anything about ATLAS data at all.
I’ve fixed the problem now. Did I see any track jets after that? Well, I can’t tell you — not for a few months at least!
