Curious random counting statistics: Theory, an actual flight experiment and possible applications for a suggested electrical circuit

Abstract

A particular method of collecting and transmitting experimental data to Earth from a pair of balloon-borne cosmic ray electron detectors is shown to lead to a curious distribution in counting statistics which is not interpretable on the basis of a simple Poisson distribution. Dead-time corrections and a “house-keeping” mode, together with the fact that the instrumental scaler only has a finite number of channels, lead to a calculable distortion of the basic statistical distribution. When these effects are allowed for, remarkably good agreement is achieved between theoretical expectations and observations. The above results have led us to the design of a simple electrical circuit which incorporates the capability of (1) removing variable “seeing” conditions and (2) easily detecting periodic components in an event rate which has a high random component. These are features which are of great interest under particular experimental conditions.