In experimental physics, we need to use a lot of data to reduce errors, and to make sure that the effects we see are typical, rather than special cases.

Click on the links below to see some more examples of the decay we have just been looking at. For each one you can go through the stages of calculating the lifetime of the . Is it always the same, or does the lifetime vary?

If you examined a huge number of events, and plotted a histogram of the lifetimes, you would be able to work out the particle's halflife - just as a population of unstable radioactive atoms has a halflife, so does a population of unstable particles.

Event 1 Event 2 Event 3 Event 4
Event 5 Event 6 Event 7 Event 8
Event 9 Event 10 Event 11 Event 12
Event 13 Event 14 Event 15 Event 16
Event 17 Event 18 Event 19 Event 20
Event 21 Event 22 Event 23 Event 24
Event 25

When you have finished looking at these events, click on 'Next' to see how we would build up a histogram of lifetimes (in order to calculate the mean).
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