Another (sort of) pretty picture

Well I didn’t have a meeting with my advisor today because he’s out of town and so I decided to put up a picture of something I’ve been working on on the side instead. I’m putting together a talk about my research which I’ll be giving to some grad students in a few weeks and decided to find some decent-looking pictures of the event display at CLEO-c. This turned out to be rather more difficult than expected, but in the end I did more or less triumph over adversity and ended up coming up with the picture below.

It’s neat because you can see the charged tracks (the green things) and showers in the calorimeter (the blue towers). The reason the tracks are curved is because the whole thing is in a strong magnetic field. The less curved a track is, the more momentum that particle has. If you sort of add up the momenta, you can tell that there’s a lot missing in the downward direction. That means that there’s a neutrino or K-Long which went that way, basically, since they’re the type of particle that don’t get detected by any parts of the detector. So we couldn’t see that it. But you can calculate how much energy and momentum it had by counting up how much everything else had and knowing how much there was to begin with (because we know that we started off with an electron and a positron of a given energy).

Now I haven’t actually analyzed this particular part of our dataset (nor will I be doing so) so I can’t say anything more about the event, and I realize that these pictures are not really as pretty as astronomer’s pictures, but you can’t really blame me for trying.