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

Steve Koch 04:24, 21 December 2010 (EST):Very nice data and plots seen in your notebook. A plot would have been nice for this page too. =Poisson Lab Summary=

Summary of Activities
In this lab I used some software on the computer in the lab to take data, which I then uploaded to the internet, and used to form some plots to show the similarities between the distributions obtained from the observed counts, and the Poisson distribution. Comparisons to the Poisson distributions were also made by seeing if the standard deviation was close to the square root of the mean.

Lab Notebook
My lab notebook is located here: My Lab Notebook.

Results
As can be seen in the lab note book, for each of the runs, there was significant visual similarity between the plots of the observed counts and the Poisson distribution. And for the mean about equal to ten case, there was significant similarity between the normal distribution and the observed distribution.

It should also be noted that the standard deviation in all cases was almost exactly the square root of the mean, the difference between the two was always less than 0.1, which is a very small difference. From those two tests, it appears that the observed distribution is a Poisson distribution.

Improvements for Future Labs
In the future it would be nice to have more user friendly program, as the one currently used does not work as you would expect. Since you must change the settings by first changing the mode, then changing the settings, then changing back to the data taking mode. It would be nicer if that would be more intuitive. It would also have been nice to have covered the Poisson distribution in class.