The issue of making high energy physics data more broadly accessible has been quite widely debated. We would like to draw your attention to a recent development in this area.

The DZero collaboration has just submitted a paper, "Search for New Physics Using QUAERO: A General Interface to D0 Event Data" to Physical Review Letters, and to hep-ex (hep-ex/0106039):

http://arXiv.org/abs/hep-ex/0106039

While the paper contains new results on searches for new physics, perhaps the more significant aspect is that for the first time the collaboration makes data sets from a high energy physics experiment available to the full community, much as astronomical data has traditionally been.

The Quaero facility is on the web at

quaero.fnal.gov

This public web interface allows anyone to search several subsets of D0 Run I data involving high transverse momentum electrons, muons, jets and missing transverse momentum. Proposed signals from new physics can either be generated inside Quaero by giving control cards to the PYTHIA Monte Carlo generator, or submitted in the form of a file of event four-momentum vectors for the new physics signal. The Quaero program smears the signal event objects as appropriate for the D0 detector resolutions, finds the optimum region in a space of a few defined variables, and compares the expected background in that region with the number of events observed in the data. Cross-section limits (or signal cross-sections in the case of an observed excess over background) are returned to the submitter by e-mail. D0 will monitor submissions to ensure the validity of the background estimates and of the programming; the submitter is expected to take scientific responsibility for the results, and is free to publish the results with citation of the Quaero publication.

Our aim is to make the data available in a way that allows a scientific user, unfamiliar with the details of the D0 experiment, nonetheless to use D0 data to test new theoretical ideas. We hope that this will foster a wider use of HEP data and stimulate more innovative uses of that data than has been possible up to now. We would appreciate any comments you might have on this new direction for high energy physics experiments, as well as any suggestions for Quaero's improvement.

Last modified: Thu Jun 14 14:41:52 CDT 2001