WSE 187 III 2006 Effect of Materials Experiment Procedure

From MariachiWiki

What is the Effect of Different Materials on Cosmic Rays?

Objective

The objective of this experiment is to see how cosmic rays differ when exposed to different materials. Velocity is the main factor of cosmic rays that we are going to study. Will the speed of cosmic rays increase, decrease, or stay the same when exposed to high density or low density elements? By how much is the speed going to increase or decrease when exposed to these different materials? All these questions will be explored in this experiment.

Materials

2 Scintillators

1 oscilloscope

Aluminum

Wood

1 person (any volunteers?)

Procedure

The control of this experiment will be the speed of cosmic rays without any materials added in the experiment, as we have done in the previous experiment. We set two scintillators at a fixed distance from each other and we use the oscilloscope to measure the speed of the cosmic rays. We keep the scintillators at the same disctance, but now we add different materials in between them, and again we measure the speed. We repeat the experiment with different materials added between the two scintillators. The control setup, the one without any material between the scintillators but with the same distance will be compared to the one with the setup that has the material in between, if the number of coincidences decreases then the material is blocking the cosmic rays, otherwise they are not. Therefore, it is the density of the object that is affecting the travel speed of the cosmic rays.