Ideas for extending Muon-Life-Time experiment? Background: I'm teaching a lab experiment for measuring the Muon lifetime. The experiment is a big tube of scintillator attached to a PMT. The muon entering the scintillator generates a reading in the discriminator, if the muon decays inside the scintillator the decay  electron (Michel electron) is generating another reading, thus enabling the students to measure the time between stopping and decay. After few days of sampling they have a nice lifetime distribution and they calculate G fermi ($G_F$) and the muon's mean lifetime.
Since this experiment is very light I'm searching for new ways of extending it, I would love to hear some ideas on what else the students can measure?
 A: There are a couple of reasonably easy options


*

*Rate variation with height Give the measured muon lifetime and assuming they travel at approximately the speed of light, you can estimate the expected flux at higher and lower altitudes in your same geographic area. So try it an see. To make the right prediction you have to factor in time dilation (or length contraction from the muon's POV).

*Rate variation with overburden Very low background experiments (neutrinos, neutrinoless double beta decay, direct dark matter) typically go underground (or under ice or water) to reduce the backgroupd rate due to cosmic muons. If you have access to a cave or mine with the appropriate infrastructure and permission you can measure the extinction factor as a function of depth.
Both of these suggestions are complicated a bit by the simple apparatus you are using: They rely on stopping muons which means there is a multiplicative factor related to the muon spectrum that has to be considered. It'll be a small adjustment of modest height or overburden changes, but significant as you increase the range in independent variable. If your data acquisition system record singles (or a prescaled fraction of the singles) you may be able to estimate the stopping fraction from the data and correct for it.
