Along with many other particle physicists, I’ve been working hard lately to prepare results for the 35th International Conference on High Energy Physics, which will be held in Paris starting on July 22nd. That means I am again going through the complexities of reviewing my work with my (3000+) collaborators, to make sure that the work I’ve done is something we all have confidence in. After all, everyone’s name will be on it!
So far, things are going well, and it looks like (cross your fingers) the analysis will be out and ready. I just designed a poster this week, and some of the plots might also appear in one of the ATLAS talks given by one of my colleagues. The approval process has also been a great opportunity to get feedback — some of which has been included in the current analysis, and some of which will be added as we update and improve the results for a complete paper.
I’ll be able to show you the latest results once the ICHEP conference starts, but for now I at least have some plots of track jets from last year’s 900 GeV run, one of which is shown here at right. You can click the image for more and bigger pictures, but I don’t promise that the text will be too comprehensible! I’ve written a more understandable explanation of the track jet analysis here. The plot on this page shows the momentum of track jets we found in the 900 GeV data (black points) and compares it to the momentum of simulated track jets (yellow graph). You can tell a few things from it: first, there are a lot more low-momentum jets than high-momentum jets, which is exactly what we expect; second, that the data and the simulation agree pretty well; third, that they don’t agree perfectly.
There are two basic reasons why data and simulation might not agree: one is that we aren’t simulating our detector accurately enough, and the other is that we’re not simulating the underlying physics that comes out of the collision well enough. Working out which is which, and coming up with our best guess as to what really happened when the protons collided, is the hard work of data analysis. How did it go? To find out, come see my poster at the ICHEP conference, or just stay tuned here!
Tags: ATLAS, collaboration, conference
