Demonstration of 1st year undergraduate physics laboratory experiments.

Half-Life & Poisson Distributions

My responsibility was demonstrating experiments on the half-life of a radioactive source and the Poisson distribution. This involved setting up the apparatus, ensuring that radiation safety measures were followed, dispensing radioactive materials and guiding students through the experiment.

Students were required to measure the activity of a sample of Barium-137m using a Geiger-Muller tube connected to a counter. They then used this data to calculate the half-life of the source. The Barium-137m was provided in a solution generated by elution of a Cesium-137 generator.

This source was then replaced with a gamma-ray source of known activity, and students were asked to measure the count rate and how it varied with distance from the source. This was used to demonstrate the inverse square law of radiation.