Measuring the Muon Lifetime

This is intended to be a dynamic page with updated information, more and and better questions, and reports on progress of various tasks.

• Understand the Source of Cosmic Ray Muons: What are muons? In what ways are they similar or different from electrons? What is the process by which muons are created from particles that come from space (cosmic rays)?
• Understand How the Experiment Works: How do some muons from cosmic rays get trapped in our apparatus? What is the double pulse method we use to record the muon lifetime? What is the muon lifetime and how does it compare with lifetimes of living things?
• Basic Ideas: How do we plot the data? Why do we plot the logarithm of the number of events versus the decay time? What do we learn from the slope of this plot?
• Quantitative Analysis: (1) Determine the muon lifetime with a least squares fit to the data. (2) Understand the errors associated with these measurements, both the statistical error and the systematic error. What are the differences between these kinds of errors? (3) Estimate the statistical error by simulating many experiments with the same number of events via a "toy Monte Carlo."
• Conclusions: What have you learned about the physics of muon decay, the way we do the measurement of the muon lifetime and about data analysis?