Jitter is a term used to describe the variation in conduction time of a modular pulsed-water power system. Low throughput jitter is critical to successful waterline technology. An investigation of throughput jitter in the plasma opening switch of a prototype system (Journal of Applied Physics, Sept. 1993) yielded the following descriptive statistics on conduction time for n = 18 trials: y̅ = 334.8 nanoseconds, s = 6.3 nanoseconds.

a. Construct a 95% confidence interval for the true standard deviation of conduction times of the prototype system.

b. A system is considered to have low throughput jitter if the true conduction time standard deviation is less than 7 nanoseconds. Does the prototype system satisfy this requirement? Explain.