Learning to See at the Large Hadron Collider

Abstract

The staged commissioning of the Large Hadron Collider presents an opportunity to map gross features of particle production over a significant energy range. I suggest a visual tool - event displays in (pseudo)rapidity-transverse-momentum space - as a scenic route that may help sharpen intuition, identify interesting classes of events for further investigation, and test expectations about the underlying event that accompanies large-transverse-momentum phenomena.