The proton-proton collisions at the LHC can create a large variety of particles. Many of these are quarks; however, due to the intricacies of the strong force, quarks cannot exist on their own. When quarks are created, they create showers of particles in the calorimeter known as jets. Jets are reconstructed from calorimeter information using sophisticated algorithms. Even after this, their energy measurement is often systematically off from true energies, and so we correct for this when reconstructing jets. One correction is for punch-through jets; these are jets which are so high-energy that they escape the calorimeter. We measure the amount of energy lost by looking at the number of segments that show up in the muon spectrometer behind the jet. My project was to find the uncertainty that this correction induces on our measurements, especially for the new data at sqrt(s)=13TeV from 2015, 2016, and 2017. To do this, we compared results from data and the results from detailed Monte Carlo simulations, to capture any limitations in our simulation, reconstruction, and/or correction techniques.
This project allowed me to learn a lot about how experimental physics research is conducted, and the kind of questions that are asked in the field. There are a lot of questions that I would never have thought to ask that I learned to be able to see when tackling a project. I also gained valuable experience doing computer programming for scientific applications. These skills will only help in anything I do with physics in the future, as I will be better equipped to tackle problems that come my way.
The proton-proton collisions at the LHC can create a large variety of particles. Many of these are quarks; however, due to the intricacies of the strong force, quarks cannot exist on their own. When quarks are created, they create showers of particles in the calorimeter known as jets. Jets are reconstructed from calorimeter information using sophisticated algorithms. Even after this, their energy measurement is often systematically off from true energies, and so we correct for this when reconstructing jets. One correction is for punch-through jets; these are jets which are so high-energy that they escape the calorimeter. We measure the amount of energy lost by looking at the number of segments that show up in the muon spectrometer behind the jet. My project was to find the uncertainty that this correction induces on our measurements, especially for the new data at sqrt(s)=13TeV from 2015, 2016, and 2017. To do this, we compared results from data and the results from detailed Monte Carlo simulations, to capture any limitations in our simulation, reconstruction, and/or correction techniques.
This project allowed me to learn a lot about how experimental physics research is conducted, and the kind of questions that are asked in the field. There are a lot of questions that I would never have thought to ask that I learned to be able to see when tackling a project. I also gained valuable experience doing computer programming for scientific applications. These skills will only help in anything I do with physics in the future, as I will be better equipped to tackle problems that come my way.