Possible measurements

Lifetime
The decay of a negative/positive muon into an electron/positron, a neutrino and an antineutrino requires a complete loss of energy of the muon through interactions in the scintillator material. Muons reaching the earth still have high energy, therefore most of the muons pass the detector without decaying. This means that in our experiment the rate of decays is much lower than the observed count rate of muons. The practical situation is that on average one or two decays per minute are measured.
The time resolution of the lifetime measurement is 10 ns. The LabView interface shows the result in a histogram with a corresponding bin width. A larger bin width for the representation can be chosen in the program. For a reasonable accurate determination of the muon lifetime, registration of a large amount of events and a measuring time of several days is necessary. Analysis of the resulting exponential decay usually approximates the literature value of 2.2 microseconds for the mean value of the decay time very well.

Delta time
With two detector placed vertically above each other the elapsed time between pulses in two detectors in the first place is determined by the mutual distance of the detectors and the velocity of the muons traversing the detectors.
A measurement of the elapsed time between pulses in two detectors at a certain distance results in a Gauss distribution of times. No sharp value of the difference in time is observed, because of the fact that the position where the light flash is produced varies. Light resulting from interactions has to travel varying distances in the scintillator material before it reaches the photomultiplier. The mean value of the distribution can be used for the determination of the velocity of the muons. Taking into account the hardware delay of the signal analyzer, which has to be measured separately, a value slightly lower than the speed of light usually is found after calculation.
The time resolution of the delta time measurement is 0.5 ns, the LabView interface shows the result in a histogram with a corresponding bin width.

Pulse height
The MuonLab analyzer box offers the possibility of sampling the analog signal at the input of channel 1 in an Analog to Digital Converter operating at 200 MHz. At practical values of PMT high voltage and threshold a very large number of low value pulse heights is measured, due to the contribution of noise and low energy interactions. Therefore, a coincidence condition between channel 1 and channel 2 has been introduced with a coincidence window of 100 ns. This reduces the measurement of the pulse height in channel1 to the rate of simultaneous detections of pulses in both detectors/channels within the time window of 100 ns.
The amplitude range of the ADC is 0 to 2V, the digital storage is in a 255 byte memory. Therefore the amplitude resolution of the pulse height measurement is about 8 mV . The LabView interface shows the result in a histogram with a corresponding bin width. The Landau distribution of charged particle interaction pulse heights is clearly visible. Registrations in the low pulse height region can be suppressed by the setting of the threshold at the input of channel 1.

Singles and coincidences
Single in both cannels can be measured using the preset time and preset count possibilities of the LbaView interface. The influence of PMT high voltage and threshold value on count rate can be determined. The results have to be registered manually.
The LabView program also offers the possibility to investigate coincidences between pulse registrations in the two channels within a time window. The coincidence window has been chosen at a fixed value of 100 ns. Both the coincidence rate and the total number of events in preset time or preset count mode can be registered.
The increase of the number of coincidences after placing lead plates above the two detectors placed next to each other as a result of production of secondary particles (Rossi experiment) can be measured.