The Mean Lifetime and Speed of Cosmic-Ray Muons
نویسنده
چکیده
Muons are produced in the upper atmosphere as a result of the collisions of incoming highenergy particles from outer space with atmospheric particles. These muons then travel through the atmosphere at high energies and are thus measured to exist for a much longer time than their mean lifetime at rest. This experiment measures both the mean lifetime of muons at rest as well as the mean speed through times of flight between fixed distances. Once the mean speed and the mean lifetime are found, the time that the muon is measured to travel through the atmosphere before decaying can be compared to the mean lifetime at rest and checked for consistency with the predictions of special relativity.
منابع مشابه
The Speed and Lifetime of Cosmic Ray Muons
We measure the mean lifetime and speed of cosmic ray muons at sea level using coincidence techniques with scintillation detectors. We find the mean speed v of muons traveling near normal to earth’s surface to be 29.8 ± 2.5 cm/ns, corresponding to βμ = 0.994 ± 0.08 and γμ of 9.14. Our result is in agreement with the accepted average speed of vμ, which is listed as between 0.994 or 0.998 dependin...
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