A Simple Setup for Cosmic Muon Lifetime Measurements

TL;DR

This paper presents a simple, cost-effective experimental setup using a single scintillation detector and accessible electronics to measure cosmic muon lifetime, making particle physics experiments more accessible for educational purposes.

Contribution

The authors developed an inexpensive, easy-to-assemble setup with custom data analysis software, enabling muon lifetime measurements outside professional laboratories.

Findings

Successful measurement of muon lifetime using the setup

Demonstration of accessible particle physics experiments for education

Open-source software for data analysis and visualization

Abstract

Elementary particle physics is a fascinating field of modern physics investigating the basic constituents of matter and their interactions. In the experiments large accelerators and very sophisticated detector systems are usually used. However, it is desirable to have simple experiments for undergraduate and even secondary school courses which can demonstrate complex investigations in this field. We have constructed a simple setup for the measurement of the lifetime of cosmic muons based on a single scintillation detector. Expensive and complicated professional particle physics equipment for the signal processing, which mainly prevented the realization of this experiment by non-experts, is replaced by simple, inexpensive and commercially available electronic components. With our setup we register time stamps of the events detected in the scintillation detector and from this data we determine the muon lifetime. Also, Python software package has been developed for data analysis and presentation of the results.