JHU Advanced Physics Lab: Franck-Hertz experiment



In this experiment you will perform an experiment which almost 100 years ago provided support for the first quantum models of the atom by Bohr.

The manual is here .

First explore the behavior of the system under all three settings. Vary the temperature, and all three voltages. Observe the several dips of multiple excitations. This part is for demonstration only.

Then collect the data using the LabVIEW data acquisition system. You should optimized all settings as discussed in the manual. Once you have good data, write it out as a text file for further analysis.

In your data analysis, make sure to estimate systematic uncertainties from the fit model. Try both models when distance between peaks/dips is constant and when it is allowed to be different. Discuss your results. See modern research (free access from JHU network) for more details.

Prior notes on this experiment may be found here and here .


Andrei Gritsan
Last update: Tue Jan 26 13:56:11 EST 2010