Opportunities and Challenges of Standard Model Production Cross Section Measurements at 8 TeV using CMS Open Data

Abstract

The CMS Open Data project offers new opportunities to measure cross sections of standard model (SM) processes which have not been probed so far. In this work, we evaluate the challenges and the opportunities of the CMS Open Data project in the view of cross-section measurements. In particular, we reevaluate SM cross sections of the production of W bosons, Z bosons, top-quark pairs and WZ dibosons in several decay channels at a center of mass energy of 8 TeV with a corresponding integrated luminosity of 1.8 fb-1. Those cross sections have been previously measured by the ATLAS and CMS collaborations and hence can be used to validate our analysis and calibration strategy. This gives an indication to which precision also new, so far unmeasured cross sections can be determined using CMS Open Data by scientists, who are not a member of the LHC collaborations and hence lack detailed knowledge on experimental and detector related effects and their handling.