Running through the beginning exercises of calculating the mass of the Z Boson by analyzing di-muon decays. We are guided by the repository located at the following hyperlink: https://github.com/cms-opendata-education/zboson-exercise
The objective of this exercise is to determine the invariant mass of the Z Boson by analyzing di-muon decays detected with the Compact Muon Solenoid (CMS) detector.
The CMS experiment is one of many experiments currently operating at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). The CMS experiment uses the CMS detector to analyze the many decay products of (usually) proton-proton collisions. The detector is 15 meters in diameter, 21 meters in length, and weighs about 15000 tons.
The Z Boson is a neutral, spin-1 vector Boson that mediates the weak nuclear force (along with the W Boson). When it is produced in proton-proton collisionsl, it will rapidly decay into other particles which are detected with CMS (we calculate its lifetime in the Jupyter notebook attached). In our exercise, we "reconstruct" the mass of the Z Boson following conservation of energy and momentum.