CERN-Electron-Collision-Data: 100k Dielectron Events for Education

CERN Open Data Portal provides 100,000 dielectron collision events from the CMS experiment, curated for outreach and education. The data includes event numbers, electron energies, momenta, charges, and invariant mass in the 2-110 GeV range. Thomas McCauley published this subset in 2014 under a CC0 waiver, with a note that selection criteria differ from official CMS physics results.

Use Cases

• Calculate invariant mass distributions based on the provided electron energy and momentum components.
• Visualize particle kinematics and pseudorapidity (eta) distributions for educational demonstrations.
• Simulate basic event reconstruction and analysis workflows using simplified, real collision data.
• Study charge correlation (Q1, Q2) between electron pairs in selected events.

Strengths

• Contains 100,000 recorded dielectron events, providing a substantial sample for educational analysis.
• Includes 19 specific physical variables per event, such as energy (E1, E2), momentum components (px, py, pz), and invariant mass (M).
• Sourced directly from the CERN Open Data Portal with a clear provenance record (DOI: 10.7483/OPENDATA.CMS.9SX7-2RZ9).
• Released under a permissive CC0 1.0 public domain waiver, minimizing legal barriers for use.

Limitations

• The dataset is explicitly a subset curated for education, and its selection criteria differ from those used in official CMS physics publications.
• Row count for the downloadable file is unknown, which may complicate storage and processing planning.
• Column-level documentation beyond the listed names is absent; precise semantics and units may require further verification.

Provenance

Source

CERN Open Data Portal (CMS experiment)

Collection Method

Selected subset of dielectron collision events from the CMS detector.