Energy loss of alpha particles
This wikipage belongs to the alpha-particle energy loss experiment Tom and I did in semester 6(early 2007). There is a repository with our results at http://www.trash-media.de/hg/alpha-lab/. It contains all our experimental data and associated programs to do the analysis.
Analysis
There are several things one could still do with the data. One of them is actually investigate the "straggling" effect by finding the FWHM of the peak without a target, then substracting it in quadrature from the others. Integration over all counts of each peak to determine how many alphas are "lost" due to scattering(very few should be). Instead of using the centroid of each peak to determine the energy loss use the half-height on the high energy side of each peak, the centroid is effected by the fact that there are multiple peaks which smear out as you get to thicker targets, the half-height probably is not. Write a program that fits a more realistic shape to the peaks, the are almost Gaussian but not quite, probably skewed on the low energy side.
Report
Attached is the conference paper "Alpha particle energy loss in metal foils and gases". Latex comes in two versions: as handed in and latest.