Spring 2010: Advanced and Intermediate Physics Lab (173.308 and 173.608)



Overview: This course is intended for physics major students at the junior or senior level, or graduate students if equivalent course has not been taken as part of undergraduate education. The goal of the course is to learn how to do scientific research through exposure to a number of prominent experiments that set the stage for our understanding of modern physics. Throughout this course, students learn theoretical background and history of experimental discoveries; obtain hands-on experience in performing physics experiments; improve data-analysis skills and learn analysis techniques; work on presentation and communication skills, both written and oral; learn software programs for data acquisition, data handling, publication, and presentation.

Everything is discussed in detail on the first day of classes:

Introduction lecture

Syllabus

Tour of the lab


Lectures on error analysis are given over the following two days in class:

Lecture on error analysis


Experiments:

1. Muon lifetime
2. Photo-electric effect
3. Pulsed NMR
4. Franck-Hertz experiment
5. Nuclear spectroscopy
6. Rutherford scattering
7. Brownian motion
8. Hall effect
9. Zeeman effect
10. Millikan oil drop experiment


Resources:

Templates for root and latex can be found here .

You may find instructions from the prior years here and here .


Andrei Gritsan
Last update: Sat Jan 30 08:33:58 EST 2010