N.P. Armitage notes on the muon lifetime experiment.

In this experiment you will measure the lifetime of the muon particle.  The muon is an unstable 2nd generation lepton.  More information can be found at the links below.

Among other aspects, this experiment gives you exposure to simple amplifiers, oscilloscope operation, and 'coincidence' techniques for event detection.  This laboratory provides a simple example of these coincidence methods that are standard techniques in particle physics.

This lab also provides you with exposure to handling massive amounts of data.  You may have as many as 15,000 muon decays to analyze that come from perhaps 1,000,000 independent event triggers.

-TeachSpin's lab manual is actually quite explanatory and useful - by T.E. Coan and J. Ye.  Also ....

- I would like to see you follow the lab manual's suggestion and use the function generator (and oscilloscope) to characterize the amplifier's properties.  What is the amplifier gain?  What is its allowable bandwidth (frequency range)?

- To get sufficient statistics to do proper data analysis, you will likely need to acquire data for greater than 48 hours.

-TeachSpin makes some simple data analysis utilities that are quite helpful in sifting through all the primary event triggers to get the number of actual muon decays.  See the manual for their description.

-Note:  The laptop is currently setup to revert back to its original properties after every login.  You cannot make any permanent preference changes.

Some helpful links:

TeachSpin's abysmal webpage on their otherwise nice product.

Some sample data from Jefferson Lab's teacher education project.  Does yours look as nice?

Lab instructions from the student lab at Preston college UK - Some helpful diagrams and explanations

More lab instructions from University College London

Muon measurement discussion and history of muon lifetime for signatures of time dilation.

Wikipedia's muon page

MIT's very comprehensive muon lifetime lab writeup.

Franz Manheim's (University of Edinburgh) also very comprehensive muon writeup and summary.

modified N.P. Armitage 2006-10-01