19/03/15 15:47 The Rainbow color map Page 1 of 8 https://root.cern.ch/drupal/print/854 Published on ROOT (http://root.cern.ch/drupal ) Home > The Rainbow color map The Rainbow color map Table of Contents Rainbow Color Definition Problems Color maps in High Energy Physics How the rainbow color map can mask structure in the data From a rainbow color map plot to a more meaningful one Rainbow color map in linear scale Dark Body Radiator color map in linear scale Rainbow color map in logarithmic scale Dark Body Radiator color map in logarithmic scale Surface plot with a Dark Body Radiator color map in logarithmic scale Another Example The aim of this page is to explain why the rainbow color map is not the best one can choose to represent physics data in pseudo color and to propose better solutions. It was written by Bernice Rogowitz (Visual Perspectives) and Olivier Couet (CERN). To introduce this topic, we will describe the work we did on the candidate Higgs boson data. In this experiment, two specially-constructed beams of particles were set to collide in front of a particle detector, tuned to measure the energy emitted by the decay of the hypothesized Higgs Boson. Hundreds of trillions of collisions were analyzed to extract the signature of the Higgs Boson, which was predicted to have a mass between 125 and 127 GeV/C 2 (Giga Electron Volts). The data represented in the four panels below is the distribution of electron volts across the particle sensor.