Physics307L F09:People/Trujillo/Poisson

POISSON
Definition

The Poisson Distribution is a discrete distribution which takes on the values X = 0, 1, 2, 3, ... . It is often used as a model for the number of events (such as the number of telephone calls at a business or the number of accidents at an intersection) in a specific time period. It is also useful in ecological studies, e.g., to model the number of prairie dogs found in a square mile of prairie.

The Poisson distribution is determined by one parameter, lambda. The distribution function for the Poisson distribution is :

$$f(k;\lambda)=\frac{\lambda^k e^{-\lambda}}{k!},\,\!$$

Where $$\lambda$$ is the amount of successes in a given period and $$k$$ is the amount of ocurances.

Data



We took data using a Multichannel Analyzer (MCA)which detects the amount of events occurring in a particular time period. Each channel represents the number of bins in time. The RAW data is found [[Media:Poisson.zip|here]]

Summary

Well, at first i was thinking that this experiment was going to be easy but it turns out that the majority of the lab is not taking the data but analyzing the data. I originally thought that I would have time to cook up snazzy LabVIEW program that would display all the distributions it an animated mode and a "single shot" mode but. I got some insight from Tomas on house exactly this is supposed to work being that he went above and beyond on the analysis.