User:Alex G. Benedict/Notebook/Physics 307L: Junior Lab/Poisson Lab

Steve Koch 04:23, 21 December 2010 (EST):Very nice data and plots. More explanation needed in primary notebook to ensure reproducibility.

Poisson Lab
This lab was performed in the junior laboratory in the UNM physics building on November 8th.

Links
[Dr. Gold's Lab Manual]

Equipment and Setup
The equipment used is listed in the lab manual, and consisted of a computer, and a device used to measure the activity. The equipment should already be set up and just needs to be turned on.

Procedure and Data
Data from each trial is listed in the spreadsheet below, all plots of the data vs the Poisson distribution are on the charts directly following the data sheet.

Results
For the first trial, the observed values were
 * mean	       0.35546875
 * min	       0
 * max 	       4
 * stddev	       0.63447475188877
 * sqrt(mean)	0.59621200088559

for the second trial:
 * mean	1.6015625
 * min	0
 * max 	6
 * stddev	1.24516220693074
 * sqrt(mean)	1.26552854570729

for the third trial:
 * mean	12.359375
 * min	2
 * max 	24
 * stddev	3.4817901611011
 * sqrt(mean)	3.51559027760631

for the fourth trial:
 * mean	0.69140625
 * min	0
 * max 	3
 * stddev	0.78869734683335
 * sqrt(mean)	0.83150841847813

for the fifth trial:
 * mean	2.67578125
 * min	0
 * max 	7
 * stddev	1.58682052773932
 * sqrt(mean)	1.6357815410378

for the sixth trial:
 * mean	4.88671875
 * min	0
 * max 	14
 * stddev	2.30065194830833
 * sqrt(mean)	2.21059239797842

For each of the six trials above, the standard deviation was never more than 0.1 away from the square root of the mean, which implies the distributions were all Poisson Distributions.