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Brief
Explanation about this experiment...
During this program the students
put together a set of 8 scintillation counters with phototubes and
electronics to study
the distribution of cosmic ray air showers here in the Physics
Building. These detectors were made out of single sheets of
scintillating plastic 36" X 36" X 1" with a phototube optically coupled
to the scintillator sheet in the center of the 36" X 36"
face. Each detector was equiped with a 12 stage, 2" diameter
phototube with bialkali photocathode.
We arranged these 8 counters in a
grid pattern with 5 counters along a N-S line and 3 counters along an
E-W line in our
lab. These counters were separated at intervals of approximately
48". The signals from each of these detectors was amplified
and discriminated and the amplified signal was routed to an Aquirus
data acquisition system to record the waveforms from
each of the detectors during an event and the discriminated siganls
were used to make a majority coincidence to trigger the
readout of the system. The trigger threshold for each of the
detectors was set at approximately the 1 photoelectron level which
was well below the typical response of the detector to a through going
cosmic ray muon. Data was taken with a 7 out of 8 trigger
and a 4 out of 8 trigger.
The data taken was then
analyzed using the arrival time difference for signals between the 8
counters to measure the direction
cosines of the cosmic ray shower being detected. This experiment
was a prototype run for a larger air shower array project that
our experimental group is planning develop in the future.
Students involved
Diana
Fulton
PDF file
PPT file
dfulton@uccs.edu
Eric Kalix
rjrowekamp@stthomas.edu
air001_019
air001_019_2
air001_030
Pictures of the actual experiment
Data plots with one line description
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