1 / 1

Detecting Cosmic Rays with MoNA

Physics of Atomic Nuclei PAN -2009 - NCSL. Team Astigmatics Lori Gleason – MHS Elizabeth Letter – BRHS Joe Spaccavento - NAHS. Detecting Cosmic Rays with MoNA. Determining Muon Velocity. What are Cosmic Rays? Different forms of matter/energy traveling through space

scott
Download Presentation

Detecting Cosmic Rays with MoNA

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Physics of Atomic Nuclei PAN -2009 - NCSL Team Astigmatics Lori Gleason – MHS Elizabeth Letter – BRHS Joe Spaccavento - NAHS Detecting Cosmic Rays with MoNA Determining Muon Velocity What are Cosmic Rays? Different forms of matter/energy traveling through space Primary “cosmic rays” include protons & nuclei of heavier elements Secondary (“processed” by Earth’s atmosphere) are mostly muons and electrons (from showers) What is MoNA? MoNA (the Modular Neutron Array) is a detector array specialized in detecting neutrons, the neutral particles in the core of atoms, and muons, which are produced by cosmic rays. MoNA measures how fast these particles were going and where they hit the detector. Since these particles are not charged, it is rather difficult to detect them. MoNA detects these particles indirectly because when these particles interact with MoNA inside the plastic scintillator, it iis excited and causes light emission (scintillation). The scintillation light travels along the detector bar and at each end, the light is detected by photo-multiplier tubes. Cosmic Ray Shower Descending on MoNA Scintillation in MoNA Detector Bar Our Experiment We used MoNA to determine the speed of cosmic muons. One assumption we made was that speed of the muons was constant. We hypothesized that if we could determine the time it took a muon to travel from the top detector on MoNA to the bottom, we could use this data with the distance between the detectors to calculate the speed by dividing the distance by the time. The distance between the top bar and the bottom bar was 1.5 meters for all five bars. Results We analyzed data from five of the fifteen bars. As shown in table 1, the value for time ranged from 5.22 ns to 5.27 ns with an average of 5.24 ns. The velocity ranged from 2.85 x 10^8 m/s to 2.87 x 10^8 m/s with an average of 2.86 X 10^8 m/s. This was 95.333% the speed of light. Conclusions The five bars measured very similar values. We were able to use MoNA to calculate the speed of the cosmic muons within an acceptable range. We calculated a 3.70% error from the accepted value of 2.96 X 10^8 m/s. Table 1: Change in Time from Bar 0 to Bar 15 * Background Image * Menzel 3 in the constellation Norma might be a source for Cosmic Rays in our galaxy

More Related