Physics 374, Experiments in Modern Physics I, Spring 2012

This material can be found online at URL

http://spiff.rit.edu/classes/phys374/phys374.html

See the syllabus for general information about this course.

• How to keep a lab notebook
• How to write a lab report
• Prof. Pierce's guide to lab safety and lab notebooks (thanks to Michael Pierce of RIT's Physics Department

• Schedule of experiments (PDF)

Tools

• The abstract of your lab report
• Introduction to gnuplot You can find tips for installing gnuplot on a Mac OS X machine in the introduction.
  • Answers to the gnuplot exercises
• A simple example of propagating uncertainties
• Fitting a straight line to data
  • Finding the uncertainty in a slope using gnuplot to do most of the work
  • Professor Barton's guide to fitting a straight line in Excel with LINEST
• Fitting a linear or power law to data
• When are more free parameters justified?
• Beware the seductive histogram
• Questions about statistical estimates? Perhaps Rene Andrae's guide to error estimation in astronomy might help (even for questions about physics)
• Introduction to latex
  • Latex Homework Assignment: Motion of an insect due in class, Wed, April 4
  • The template LaTeX file for a lab report (which you'll have to completely re-write yourself, of course). The template includes this JPEG image of a boat. If you run LaTeX on the template, you should produce a formatted document which looks like this (PDF).
  • ProTexT is a good place to get an installation package for Windows machines.
  • MacTeX is a good place to get an installation package for Mac OS X machines.
  • LaTeXiT is a tool for Mac OS machines which allows one to create a nice equation quickly and easily, without writing a full LaTeX source file. The nice equation can then be pasted into another document.
  • A short tutorial for making very simple tables
  • An example of a big scientific paper in LaTeX. In this directory you can find
    • the source code for the main paper, body.tex
    • the encapsulated Postscript files for Figures, such as Figure3.eps
    • a PDF copy of the typeset paper, body.pdf
    • all the "extra" little files required for LaTeX to operate properly on this paper, such as pasj.tex . If you write an article for some particular publication, you'll probably have to use a style file which they will supply.

Experiments

The list below simply provides a little information about each activity. You can find the manuals and pre-lab exercises and auxiliary information for each lab exercise on

RIT mycourses, section 1017.374.01-04

  Experiment                     Duration              Pre-lab?
---------------------------------------------------------------
  double-slit interference        2 weeks                yes

  electron diffraction            1 weeks                yes

  photoelectric effect            2 weeks                yes

  electron charge-to-mass         1 week                 yes

  Millikan oil-drop               1 week                 yes

  blackbody radiation             1 week                 no

  atomic spectra                  1 week                 yes 
---------------------------------------------------------------

For more information

• This course follows the material taught in the Modern Physics course, SPSP 314. You can find notes from this course
  • as taught by Michael Richmond

• There's a very detailed guide to many features of gnuplot by Kowano-san at
  • http://t16web.lanl.gov/Kawano/gnuplot/index-e.html

This page maintained by Michael Richmond. Last modified Mar 13, 2012.