Hugonweb | High Energy Experiment

CMSSW Quick Reference

LHE Format Reference

HEPEVT Format Reference

SUSY mSUGRA Reference

1Underlying Event--Not just the interesting stuff in a hadron collider event, but all of it, including the quarks and gluons that undergo \"soft\" collisions

2Minimum Bias or Inclusive--Events that are not triggered or selected in any way; data with minimum artificial bias

3Rapidity-- $y \rightarrow E=m_T \cos y$, where $m_T^2 = m^2 + P_T^2$

4Pseudorapidity-- $\eta = - \ln [\tan(\theta/2)]$

5Resonances--short lived hadrons that decay by the strong interaction

6 For a Charged Particle in Constant Magnetic field, the Radius of curvature is: $R = \frac{p}{qB}$

In Monte-Carlo Programs, the particle type is standardized to the following "PDG ID" numbers:

Particle PDG ID
d 1
u 2
s 3
c 4
b 5
t 6
e$^-$ 11
$\nu_e$ 12
$\mu^-$ 13
$\nu_\mu$ 14
$\tau^-$ 15
$\nu_\tau$ 16
g 21 (9)
$\gamma$ 22
Z 23
W$^+$ 24
H 25
p 2212
n 2112
$\pi^+$ 211
$\pi^0$ 111
K$^+$ 321

Negative numbers denote the anti-particle where applicable, e.g. $\pi^-$ is -211.

See my little cheat-sheet here created from the 2007 PDG Review

High Energy Physics Statistics (and Jargon)

In high energy physics, when fitting a distribution, a quantity called the \"pull\" is often investigated. This quantity is called the studentizedresidual in other fields. It is composed of the residual, data - prediction, divided by the error on the prediction. See discussion of similar ratios here

Often, when comparing an observed distribution to a fit a \"pull distibution\" is investigated. A more general name for this is a test of normality of the residuals see Wikipedia. This is just a distribution of pulls from all data points in a fit. They should be normally distributed.

Some references on the jacknife method:

M. H. Quenouille, "Approximate tests of correlation in time-series", J. Roy. Statist. Soc. Ser. B. 11 (1949) 68--84. http://www.jstor.org/stable/2983696

J. Tukey, "Bias and confidence in not quite large samples", Annals of Mathematical Statistics 29 (1958), no. 614, 1261--1295.

An open access article: http://projecteuclid.org/euclid.aoms/1177698418

Some Papers

LHC Phyics First 1,2 years: http://arXiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0504221v1

Searching For New Physics at Future Accelerators: http://arXiv.org/abs/hep-ph/0410223v2


  1. D. Green, High P~T~ Physics at Hadron Colliders, Cambridge University Press, 2005, p. 60,72 

  2. Ibid, p.73 

  3. Ibid, p. 241 

  4. Ibid, p. 39 

  5. B.R. Martin and G. Shaw, Particle Physics, Third Ed., Wiley and Sons, 2008, p. 66 

  6. PDG Live 2011