Speed of a Muon

Mohit Bansil(North Farmington High School) & Alex Johnson(Woodhaven High School)

Teacher Mentor: Mike Niedballa(Michigan Collegiate High School)

Research Metor: Rob Harr(Wayne State University)

Our experiment is designed to find the speed of a muon. We set up 4 stacked detectors and recorded the time that a muon took to pass through the detectors and used it to calculate the average speed. The final results showed that the average speed of a muon is about .95 times the speed of light. The accepted speed of a muon is .996 times the speed of light, which means our data had a 4.6% error.  This could easily be caused by unknown variables such as multiple muons hitting or delay times between the muon passing and the photon being detected.