Exploring the space of jets with CMS Open Data

Abstract

We conduct two physics studies on the space of jets using the CMS 2011 Open Data, experimental data of 7 TeV proton-proton collisions from the 2011 Run at the Large Hadron Collider released by the CMS collaboration for public use. Our first study uses the Energy Mover's Distance (EMD), a metric that quantifies the similarity in radiation pattern between two jets. This metric allows us to perform novel visualizations of the data including embedding the data into low-dimensional spaces and providing us a new method for quantifying detector effects. Our second study applies the jet topics method to find separate quark and gluon observable distributions. This method is closely related to topic modeling, a statistical model in natural language processing to find topics in a collection of documents. Lastly, we release a sample of over 800,000 high-quality jets from the 2011 run as well as the accompanying jets from the CMS-provided Monte Carlo samples. The aim of this release is to allow future physics studies to bypass the time-consuming steps of processing and validating the CMS Open Data.