Introduction

The manual has a lengthy introduction about the physics of muons and how the detector and electronics work. It’s all super relevant info and worth a read. We don’t use the software that TeachSpin provided, and instead use a LabView program that was written by a previous lab tech. The Labview program works much more consistently and makes data collection much easier, so you can ignore the software section of the manual. You can find the manual here.

    You will work through all of the student exercises on pages 31-33 in your lab session. The exercises usually have questions attached to them. You can write down the answers in your lab notebook, and they are helpful in forcing you to think about how the detector and electronics work, but you don’t need to include the answer to all of these questions in your report. If you feel like any of the questions/answers are relevant, then feel free to add them to your report.

    A lot of students have trouble with Exercise 4. The idea is to look at pairs of pulses with a specific time between them, which you control with the pulse timer knob on the top of the scintillator. You will look at the pulses on an oscilloscope while the LabView program is running. You should see an increase in the counts of the time bin in the LabView program that corresponds to the timing you see on the scope. SPOILER: The FPGA has impeccable timing.

    Ignore steps 10,11, and 13, at least as far as your data analysis and report are concerned. Of course, you are free to do these calculations out of interest. You will calculate the muon stopping rate for the altitude the apparatus is at. Note that the integral limits in the equation for t⁰ are backwards, so you will end up with a negative number for time in the particles rest frame. You can flip the integral limits or just take the magnitude of the value. Also note that the link to the integral solver in the manual doesn’t work. You can use the Wolfram online integral calculator.

    Keep note of the time that you start recording data for the muon lifetime. It takes quite a few hours to collect enough data to get a decent fit. Your experiment may even have to run overnight. If you haven’t ben sent your data and the time the experiment ended within 24 hours, please contact Dr. FitzGreen. You will need those times to calculate the muon stopping rate.