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Simulation of cosmic ray shower
Inspiration
We have a cosmic ray detector which we wanted to learn more about by analyzing and visualizing cosmic ray showers.
What it does
It is a simulation of cosmic rays entering the atmosphere. It shows the protons that collide with other particles in the atmosphere, and then how the resulting particles decay further into other particles. We are particularly interested in muons because these are what can be detected by the CosmicPi detector.
How I built it
We built it using native Python 3 and Matplotlib. A lot of abstraction and object oriented programming was done to simplify the process. We used realistic particle decay kinematics and probabilities, taking into account special relativity.
Challenges I ran into
One problem we ran into was incorporating relativity into the simulation, and it was difficult to accurately depict the particles decaying based on their half life. Another difficulty was finding data because there is a lot of variation in the information we found.
Accomplishments that I'm proud of
We are proud that we figured out how to proper
What we learned
We learned about the life of each subatomic particle once they reach our atmosphere.
What's next for Cosmic Ray Shower Simulation
We would like to get our CosmicPi detector working in order to collect data and compare it to our simulated results.
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