Particle decay: widths, phase space, and the interaction hierarchy

What mean lifetime does the delayed-coincidence time distribution support, and how much does negative-muon capture in the scintillator bias it downward? Useful evidence includes decay-time histogram, a maximum-likelihood exponential fit with an accidental background, the fitted lifetime against 2.197 microseconds, and the μ-minus capture correction that makes the raw fit a mixture of two rates.

This GioPhysics course map is an adaptable learning sequence, not academic credit, accreditation, or a universal university syllabus. It is written for a four-credit course of roughly three lecture hours plus two to three laboratory or computational hours a week across fifteen weeks, and it is deliberately more mathematical than University Physics I–IV: linear algebra and differential equations are working tools here, not background. Twenty units are mapped against a suggested fifteen-week delivery, so several units share a teaching week. Departments differ widely in how much formalism they expect at this stage; follow your institution's published scope, notation, laboratory programme, and assessment rules. A result should be checked against units, signs, limiting cases, and the conditions under which its model was derived.