Effectiveness of physical material shields in reducing atmospheric muon flux

Abstract

In this experiment we studied the ability of lead to shield against cosmic ray muons. We built detectors that used plastic scintillators, silicon photomultipliers, and amplification circuits. We filtered out other ionizing radiation by using two detectors stacked on top of one another and only recorded a detection when both were triggered. We measured the muon flux though the 5cm by 5cm scintillators without a shield and also underneath various thicknesses of lead. The rates were compared to a Geant4 simulation of the apparatus, and were found to be slightly lower than the expected rate. The energy deposited in the detectors was found to be within 10 % of the energy predicted by the simulation.