Poisson Statistics

Prior scientific knowledge has shown that the radioactive decay of nuclei can be modeled as a series of independent, random events. [1] The probability for the occurence of such events can thus be modeled by Poisson statistics. In this experiment, we studied the radioactive decay of Cs by using a NaI scintillator. We recorded the counts per second for 100 consecutive one-second long intervals at countrates of approximately 1, 5, 10, and 100 counts per second and attempted to model the data using the Poisson probability distribution. It was found that the mean countrates converged to values of 0.44 ± 0.07s−1, 4.54 ± 0.21s−1; 12.74 ± 0.36s−1, and 96.05 ± 0.98s−1. The second part of this experiment involved using Monte Carlo calculations to simulate random data and creating Poisson distributions that were comapared to our experimental data. It was found that the experimental data correlated with the simulated data. We concluded that the Poisson probability distribution can be observed in the decay of Cs.