Practical work CCP

The practical work involves detecting and measuring cosmic rays (muons).

The aim is to familiarize students with an acquisition chain dedicated to measuring cosmic rays (mainly muons). Students will need to understand how the various components of the acquisition chain work individually (power supplies, photomultipliers, scintillators, discriminators, oscilloscopes, etc.) and then build their own acquisition device using these components. One of the objectives of the device could be to determine the mass of the muon, but other purposes are possible and left to the students' imagination.

Students will then have to collect data from their device and analyze it, taking into account systematic and statistical errors in the data set.

The objective of this EU is to enable students to master the various classic elements of an acquisition chain.

Basic concepts in:

- General knowledge of particle-matter interactions and the principle of conventional detectors as described in the M2 CCP module "Experimental Astroparticles 2."

- Special relativity and relativistic kinematics,

- Nuclear and particle physics
- General physics training at M1 level

Recommended prerequisites:

- Mathematics for Physics

Practical sessions will be conducted in pairs or groups of three, depending on the number of students.
At the end of the practical sessions, a report will be submitted and graded based on the results obtained, the writing style, and the clarity of the educational content. This grade will constitute the final assessment grade.

- Initial contact and familiarization with the various devices that make up the acquisition chain.

- Initial measurements with a photomultiplier (study of the variation in response as a function of distance/intensity of the light source, saturation, etc.)

- Creation of a measurement chain for cosmic muon signals for each group.

- Acquisition over several days

- Data analysis (determination of the muon mass and errors associated with measurements, etc.)

- Drafting of the report