Data+challenge+from+Nima

Nima's talk at the LHC conference will be about a data challenge. Here you can find his e-mail in case you want to come prepared for his talk or try to solve the challenge yourself before he presents it.

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Hi all,

For my talk at the LHC conference, I will talk about what early discoveries might look like with 100 pb^{-1} of data by presenting a data challenge we undertook at the IAS back in February. Lian-Tao Wang and I simulated a very reasonable model for new physics at the LHC, at 14 TeV and 100 pb^{-1}, with detector simulation using PGS4. We then released only a set of counts and selected plots to our local colleagues to stare at, and challenged them to uncover the underlying model. I stress that unlike the ``LHC olympics" where participants had access to the data, here only these counts and plots were made available, in order to most closely parallel the situation we might encounter after the summer/fall conferences of 2009. For simplicity we released signal only plots after reasonable cuts; in reality for this model, beating down the background is not an insurmountable challenge so this is an OK approximation.

Two of our post-docs, Patrick Meade and David Shih, tackled this challenge and essentially determined the underlying model to good accuracy. At the meeting, I will present the ``data" and work through their solution. If any of you are interested in looking at the plots and playing along ahead of the meeting, the ``data" can be found at [|http://phy-hal.princeton.edu/~liantaow/box/box.html].

See you at the conference!

Nima