Physics307L F07:People/Martin/Poisson Statistics

Poisson Statistics Summary

• link to my lab notebook poisson notebook
• Link to last years not so helpful lab manual lab manual

Purpose

• To learn about the not so popular cousin of the Gaussian Distribution, the Poisson Distribution.
• To look at random cosmic radiation events and see how events with random interval times between occurances make up the Poisson Distribution.

Results and disscussion

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  dwell time: 1 ms

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  dwell time: 2 ms

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  dwell time: 4 ms

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  dwell time: 8 ms

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  dwell time: 10 ms

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  dwell time: 20 ms

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  dwell time: 100 ms

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  dwell time: 200 ms

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  dwell time: 400 ms

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  dwell time: 800 ms

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  dwell time: 1 sec

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  dwell time: 2 sec

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  dwell time: 4 sec

• From a purely visual inspection of the data it appears that almost every histogram graph matches the Poisson distribution except the 800 ms, 1 sec and 2 sec dwell times, these appear to me to fit the gaussian distribution better then the Poisson. As the dwell times increase the data should appear to grow closer to the Gaussian distribution, the previous analysis of the data makes sense.
• I think that our lab was a success, the data we took matched the predicted Poisson distribution fairly well. I learned more then I knew before about the Poisson Distribution and graphing on excel.