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Find the Lifetime of the Muon |
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Find the Lifetime of the Muon |
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QuarkNet Lead Teachers Jeff Rylander and Ed Pascuzzi converse at the Winter 2001 AAPT Meeting on how to best catch muons. |
A Tale of Two Teachers...Jeff Rylander (standing, left) is a physics teacher at Maine East High School in Park Ridge, IL and a Lead Teacher in the Argonne National Lab QuarkNet Center. A few years ago, he was working at Fermilab in the TRAC program and came up with a great idea: build a simple muon detector that can record the and time the "double hits" of muons which are captured in a scintillator and then decay. This simple and successful device became the subject of Jeff's Master's thesis, which was kept on hand at Fermilab for later use. Ed Pascuzzi (standing, right) is a physics teacher at Glen Cove High School in Glen Cove, NY and a Lead Teacher in the SUNY Stony Brook QuarkNet Center. When Ed joined QuarkNet, he found himself spending at summer at Fermilab working on the upgrade of the D-Zero detector. Looking for a way to share what he was learning about scintillators and photomultiplier tubes with |
his students, he found Jeff's thesis. Ed returned to Long Island with a plan: get his School District to front the money and Fermilab to provide technical help. It worked! Ed has used his muon detector to work with his students to catch cosmic ray muons from the upper atmosphere. He and the students have used the data from the number and timing of muon double hits to find the statistical lifetime of the muon. He has presented his work to the physicists in the ATLAS program and to an AAPT meeting. Much of what Jeff and Ed have done has paved the way for the muon telescopes being made in the QuarkNet 2001 Lead Teacher Institute.Our job today will be to use some of Ed's data to calculate the lifetime of the muon in its rest frame.
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