Displaying Dimuon Events from the CMS Detector using D3.js

Physicists working on the CMS Detector
Physicists working on the CMS Detector

I became a Python geek and GnuPlot maniac since I joined CERN around three years ago. I have to admit, however, that I really enjoy the flexibility of D3.js, and its capability to render histograms directly in the web browser.

D3 is a JavaScript library for manipulating documents based on data. This library helps you to bring data to life leveraging HTML, CSS and SVG, and embed it in your website.

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The following example loads a CSV file, which includes 10,000 dimuon events (i.e. events containing two muons) from the CMS detector, and displays the distribution of the invariant mass M (in GeV, in bins of size 0.1 GeV):

Feel free to download the sample CSV dataset here.

Further reading: D3 Cookbook