User:Randy Jay Lafler/Notebook/Physics 307L/Poisson Statistics Summary

Purpose/Procedure

 * The purpose of the Poisson Statistics lab was to familiarize ourselves with a Poisson distribution and to learn how it is different from a Gausian distribution.
 * We did this by using the Spectrum Techniques UCS30 Software on the computer and adjusting the settings to those suggested in the lab manual. We set the channel number to 256 channels.  We set the high voltage to 1000V and set the mode to MCS Internal.  Once we did this we set the dwell time to 80ms, and pressed the go icon.  The NaI detector then began to count the number of decays in a certain time interval.  We repeated this procedure for the 10,20,40,80,100,200,400,800, and 1000ms dwell times and plotted the number occurances verse the number of counts.

Data Overwiew

 * We plotted the Poisson distribution on each of our graphs to compare our data with it. We graphed the 1000ms dwell time with the Gaussian distribution as well to compare the Poisson distribution, the Gaussian distribution and our data together.
 * For the graphs and the equations we used look at my lab notebook under calculations.

Error
Our data does not perfectly match the Poisson distribution because we did not choose enough channels. Choosing more channels would mean taking more measurements, which would have given us a better result. We followed what the manual suggested we set the number of channels at, but after doing the experiment we realized other lab groups got more consistent measurements by choosing the highest, 1024, channels. It takes the computer longer to do more channels, but it also would have produced for us more consistent measurements.

Acknowledgements

 * Thanks to Richard's notebook for the Gaussian function
 * Thanks to Dan's notebook for the Poisson distribution function
 * Thanks to Emran for being my lab partner.