Geiger Counter Tubes Used in Muon Detector

Overview

Three parallel Geiger-Muller Tubes were used in this project in order to produce a Cosmic Ray Muon Detector that is easy to build, low cost, and contains usable output to graph, visualize, or sonify.

Details

Cosmic rays can be described as particles that come from deep space that hit the Earth’s atmosphere at high speeds. They come from interstellar events like Supernova, Black Holes, and other happenings in the outer most reaches of the universe but there are a variety of sources including the Sun. A nuclear reaction producing a shower of subatomic particles is caused by these primary particles hitting the Earth’s surface with such tremendous energy.

To measure the performance of other project using fluorescent tubes, this Muon detector is being used as a test unit. There are six positive 5V logic outputs to a DIN socket that are provided by the prototype for the top, middle, and bottom tubes. Some LEDs were added to give some visual information that the detector is working. The LEDs are driven by one-shot timers that provides 1/8 second flash since the output pulses are only a micro second, not suitable for LEDs directly.