Digital signal processing for time of flight measurements of muons at sea level

This paper presents digital signal processing techniques for obtaining high accuracy in time of flight (TOF) measurements of muons at sea level. The Hilbert transformation of the original signal is employed as suitable time signal behavior for extracting the start time of the muon signal. Here we have used the Hilbert transformation incorporated into LabVIEW software and, as a data acquisition system, a two channel Tektronix oscilloscope running at a 2.0 GHz sample rate per channel. The muon TOF in the vertical Tupi telescope, made with two scintillator detectors separated by a distance of 3 m, is determined with an accuracy of some 1.5 ns. In this paper we report this TOF method that allows to obtain the speed, β = v / c , and consequently the rigidity (energy) of an incident particle (muon).