Physics307L F09:People/Gooden/Poisson

POISSON DISTRIBUTION
This experiment involved using a detector connected to an MCA. We used differing numbers of 'bins' which were really just windows in which we collected data and for each bin there was a set amount of time, the time delay, for which measurements were made for that bin. We varied our numbers of bins and delay times,having: 256,512 and 4096 as our number of bins. While choosing the time delays to be 800ms,100ms,10s and 40s. Once we had the data from the experiment, which amounted to the number of counts made by the detector for all the bins for each set, we found the mean and standard deviation using information about the Poisson distribution from the theory section of my Lab Notebook. I plotted the Poisson distribtions and Gaussian Distributions along with several data points from each data set chosen randomly. To plot the data points was the hardest thing to do, because the data is number of counts, and the plots I was making were of probability of getting a particular count. So what I did was to look at the data set and using matlab determine how many times a value appeared in the data set. Then knowing how many entries there were(i.e. number of bins) I found the probability of getting that count by taking how many times the count occured divided by the number of total measurements(bin #). Then I plotted that probability on the figure with the Poisson and Gaussian Distributions. For more information about this lab please refer to my labnote book which can be accessed here [Poisson]