Physics 300B

Dr. Ayars

Lab Information

You will need a bound, quad-ruled notebook such as the "blue collar" notebook available in the bookstore for about $3, or the much nicer Ampad 22-157. This should be your "lab diary" in which you keep all lab notes, results, good data, bad data, dead ends, failed attempts, Nobel Prize-winning ideas, and so on.

You will also need the lab manual, which can be purchased through the SPS.

Each week, you should turn in a short summary of the previous week's experiment. This summary should be no more than 3 pages in length. Two pages is usually sufficient, and one well-written page will do the trick. Handwritten lab reports will not be accepted: please submit well-formatted, correctly-spelled, and grammatically reasonable work.

Click here for a sample lab writeup (which is overdone and long).

Lab Schedule

This schedule may change depending on which equipment breaks and when.

Update! Stuff broke already! Note the changes below.

January 26 - February 2

  • Intro to LabView
  • Pylab

February 9

  • Milli-Can

February 16 - March 1

  • Johnson Noise
  • Temperature Coefficient of Resistivity
  • Neutron Activation and Half-Life

March 8 - 29

  • Radionuclide Identification
  • XRF test of Bohr Model
  • Muon Lifetime

April 5 - 19

  • Band Gap in Semiconductors
  • Compton Effect
  • Acoustic Bandgap

April 26 - May 10

  • Ruchardt's Method
  • Electron-Positron Annihilation
  • Avogadro's Number