Analyze the Data

The data provided here is a "cleaned-up" version of data taken by Ed Pascuzzi in the summer of 2000. He recorded muon double hits and, using MS Excel, put them into time bins of of width 0.5 microsecond. As muons decay, the number of muons decreases as the time increases. Your job is to take and analyze this data to find the lifetime of the muon using the following steps:

1. Examine the Data Table to begin analysis of the lifetime of the muon. If you have MS Excel, open the spreadsheet muonlife.xls and either analyze the data within that file or transfer to another Excel file for work.
2. Graph the data. (If you use Excel, be sure to make a scatter plot.) How does this compare with your expectation?
3. From your graph, determine the level of background "coincidental double hits" and subtract from the original data.
4. Graph this adjusted data, picking the data range you should graph.
5. Fit to an exponenential N = N₀e^-t/T and find the lifetime T.
6. That's it!