The QuarkNet Online Cosmic Ray Detector

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Background - Data - How it Works - Index - Other Sites

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The last column reports the time betwen the trigger and the prompt event. The unit is 20 nanoseconds (10^-9 seconds.) So, 212 ticks x 20 E^-9 seconds/tick or 4.24 x 10^-6 seconds after the trigger, the detector saw another event. This event may have been the particle decaying after it was trapped in the detector.

Column One

Column Two

Column Three

Column Four

Okay, so now what? What else do we need to know before we can start analyzing data to answer questions?

What time of day did a particular event occur?
The first column in the files in the /backups directory is a running clock. It does record the amount of time between events but if no events are removed from the file, one can sum the values in the first column, convert it to seconds and then know how long after the data collection started a particular line of information was written. This begs the next question. . . .

What time of day does data collection start?
Noon Greenwich time.

What information can we find in the data?
Nice try! Look for fluctuations at many time scales, hours, days, months, years. Look for patterns in the decay candidates.

Many of these studies rely on histograms. You can use our online tool to create your histogram plots.