Main Page/PHYS 4210/Muon Lifetime

Introduction

The muon is one of nature’s fundamental “building blocks of matter” and acts in many ways as if it were an unstable heavy electron, for reasons no one fully understands. Discovered in 1937 by C.W. Anderson and S.H. Neddermeyer when they exposed a cloud chamber to cosmic rays, its finite lifetime was first demonstrated in 1941 by F. Rasetti. The instrument described in this manual permits you to measure the charge averaged mean muon lifetime in plastic scintillator, to measure the relative flux of muons as a function of height above sea-level and to demonstrate the time dilation effect of special relativity. The instrument also provides a source of genuinely random numbers that can be used for experimental tests of standard probability distributions.