• Question: what is calibration?

    Asked by sameverett to Arttu, Ceri, James_M, Monica, Philip on 13 Jun 2011.
    • Photo: Philip Dolan

      Philip Dolan answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      Checking that an instrument is giving the correct reading (for example checking a thermometer by putting it in boiling water and checking it reads 100celcius).

    • Photo: James M Monk

      James M Monk answered on 13 Jun 2011:

      You have some measuring device – it could be a ruler or it could be a detector at the Large Hadron Collider. Let us say a particle detector, because it is more interesting. What the detector actually gives us when a particle hits it is an electronic signal, but we want to know what the particle’s energy is. So what happens is you fire some particles of known energy into the detector and see what signal you get.

      Then, during the experiment, when you see the same signal as you did during calibration, you know what the energy deposited must be.

Comments