printed by The River Falls Cerebral Muon Sensor Project David Schick, James Anderson, Seth Matucheski, Elizabeth Denkinger University of Wisconsin – River Falls Muons Photons collide into air molecules, creating a shower of particles, some of which are muons. These muons travel down to earth in a parabolic wave called a shower. We can detect muons using a scintillator. Scintillators A scintillator is made of aluminum foil wrapped around a clear plastic core. This special plastic will chemically react when a muon passes through it, producing light. The light will reflect of the aluminum foil until it is funneled down to an optical detector at one corner. When the light reaches the optical detector the scintillator sends a signal to the DAQ to let it know a muon has been detected. Cosmic Ray e-lab science.jsp We set out to find a directional air shower maximum, or find in which direction the air showers occur the most. We set up the scintillators in a line and rotated the configuration twice. We analyzed the data by sorting the all of the coincidences into four bins, depending upon the order in which the scintillators detected the muons. We found that we could not accurately predict where the air showers came from because of systematic error. BACKGROUND ABSTRACTEXPERIMENTAL PROCEDURE RESULTS CONCLUSIONS BIBLIOGRAPHY Our conclusion is that our data is inconclusive. We believe that our equipment is not designed for the incredibly precise data we need to effectively determine the directionality of the muon showers. We believe this experiment could be improved by more accurately calibrating the scintillators so they are all running at the same frequency. We could also use several DAQ’s to synchronize more scintillators in a three – dimensional setup. Orientation 1 (East  West) Orientation 2 (North  South) Orientation 3 (Down) Unknown Direction We took three scintillators and placed them in a line, oriented from East to West. After two weeks, we changed the orientation so that the line ran from North to South. Another two weeks after that, we again changed the orientation so the line faced from Northeast to Southwest. Each scintillator was approximately 2 meters from the next one in the configuration. To determine the event gate over which we wanted to analyze the data, we needed to determine the depth of the muon shower. We took a portion of the data and analyzed it at several different time spans to see where most of the data fell in the shortest time span we could get. Once we got all of our data uploaded to the e-lab site, we were able to create a program that organized the data into four bins. The first bin counted the number of times that out first scintillator detected a muon, followed by the second and finally the last. Our second bin counted all of the coincidences starting with our third and ending with the first. The third bin contains all of the coincidences where the middle scintillator was triggered first. The final bin would record each coincidence where the first and last scintillator detected events before the middle one. We then normalized the data and entered it into the table to see which bin had the highest percentage of coincidences. This would let us know which direction the majority of muon air showers came from.