Measuring the lifetime of Cosmic Ray Muons using an FPGA based Time to Digital Converter

The lifetime of a cosmic ray muon is conventionally measured using a time to amplitude converter (TAC). But modern FPGAs can easily measure sub-nano second time intervals. We use a time to digital converter (TDC) based on the 4 oversampling technique to measure the lifetime. The TDC is implemented on a Virtex-5 FPGA. We first present an overview of the techniques for high resolution time measurements available in the FPGA and then present, in the second chapter, a detailed description of the 4 oversampling TDC. The last chapter explains the lifetime experiment in detail the lifetime experiment implemented and the use of TDC in it. The lifetime estimated is 2:167 plus minus 0.15 s.