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”)