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. 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 2 pages (one is usually fine.) Handwritten lab reports will not be accepted: please submit well-formatted, correctly-spelled, and grammatically reasonable work. Electronic submission of lab reports is encouraged, but please use a format that is readable on all common operating systems. I recommend PDF format, generated by Latex, but you are welcome to use Mathematica notebook format or OpenDocument as well.

Click here for a sample lab writeup.

Lab Schedule

January 29

  • Milli-Can

February 5 -- February 12

  • Gnuplot
  • Intro to LabView

February 19 -- March 11

  • Avogadro's Number
  • Muon Lifetime
  • Half-Life
  • Ruchardt's Method of Cp/Cv

March 25 -- April 15

  • Temperature Coefficient of Resistivty
  • XRF Bohr Model
  • Speed of Light
  • Compton Scattering

April 22 -- May 13

  • Radionuclide Identification
  • Bandgap
  • Electron/Positron Annihilation
  • Phonons in 1-D Crystal