Muon Lifetime
Eric Chu & Joseph St. Marie
Goals of our Experience
• Gain an understanding of electronics
• Design and run a working muon
experiment
• Analyze data and improvement experiment
• Run final experiment
• Acquire data reading the lifetime of the
muon to be close to 2.19µs.
Understand the Electronics
• How do we use the oscilloscope?
• What is a scintillator?
• How does the setup work?
An Oscilloscope is…
A Scintillator is…
The Setup is…
Preparation
• Conversion Graph
Conversion Graph
Setup
First Experiment
• Started: June 25 at 16:00
• Ended: June 28 at 15:38
Results
Results Cont.
Errors
• Thresholds not set
• Scintillator D broken
• Scintillator C not receiving ample voltage
What they Mean
• Equation used is 1/c
• 1st graph = 1/0.386 = 2.591μs
• 2nd graph = 1/0.397 = 2.519μs
Final Experiment
• Started: July 2 at 12:45
• Ended: July 6 at 9:20
Preparation
•
•
•
•
Coincidence graphs
Singles graphs
New power supply
Rearranging the setup
Coincidence Between Scintillators A
& B (B fixed)
Coincidence Between Scintillators A
& B (A fixed)
Coincidence Between Scintillators B
& C (B fixed)
Singles Graph
• To see what kind of particles are coming
through (distinguish between noise and
“real” particles)
• Get a better understanding of how
threshold affects counts
Scintillator A Singles
Scintillator B Singles
Scintillator C Singles
Scintillator D Singles*
Coincidence Graphs
• Final Threshold Levels:
– Scintillator A: 120.026 mV
– Scintillator B: 200.110 mV
– Scintillator C: 70.601 mV
New Setup
Results
Results Cont.
Results Cont.
Results Cont.
What they Mean
•
•
•
•
•
Equation used is 1/c
1st graph = 1/0.567 = 1.764μs
2nd graph = 1/0.655 = 1.527μs
3rd graph = 1/0.462 = 2.165μs
4th graph = 1/0.501 = 1.996μs
Errors
•
•
•
•
•
Different setup
Width
Faulty equipment
Different conversion at lower levels?
Or . . . Fireworks!!
El Fin
(Spanish for “The End”)