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• Wednesday and Friday 9:30—11:00am or by appointment

Course Overview

The primary focus of this course is to continue your development in experimental physics.  You will investigate topics of modern physics in extended projects with four different departmental faculty members.  All good experimental physics requires sufficient knowledge of what has been done in the past as expressed in the scientific literature, skill in the laboratory, thorough data analysis, and cogent communication of results; you will develop in all of these areas.  While you will focus mainly on the laboratory projects, a secondary emphasis will be the formal treatment of error analysis and the statistics of measurement.

Course Components and Grading

• Lecture

The lecture will focus mainly on the topic of measurement uncertainty and the statistics of measurement.  You already have a great deal of experience estimating and propagating uncertainty, but most likely have not investigated the topic in a formal setting.  We will use Taylor’s book to fill in these gaps.  In class we will work through the text together with a student leader for the day.  As the class leader you are expected to review the main points from the reading, ask questions of the well-read and prepared class, and help the class work example problems. 

In addition to tackling Taylor, we will discuss journal articles, your laboratory reports, current topics in physics, and careers in physics.

• Laboratory

The course is centered on the laboratory experiences.   You will work with individual faculty members in groups of two on a project lasting 3 weeks.  Regardless of the field of research, the main components of the projects are:

o        Synthesis of relevant literature

o        Experimental measurement

o        Data analysis

o        Writing of a formal laboratory report

You will complete four such projects, each with a different faculty member.  We will determine the schedule of projects in the first couple classes, and from then on it is your responsibility to contact and meet regularly with the project instructor and make timely progress on the project.  Laboratory projects are due 4pm on the Monday at the end of the project period, i.e., Feb. 12, Mar. 5, Apr. 2, and Apr. 23.

·         Homework

Since we will work through the text together in class, it is important that you come to lecture having read the material and ready to participate.  There will not be assigned homework problems. 

Since the primary focus of the class is the laboratory projects, you will be asked in the second week of each project to turn in a status report (details in a separate handout).

·         Quizzes

There will be four in-class quizzes on the material covered in the text.

·         Laboratory Notebook

You should keep a detailed laboratory notebook.  No offense intended, but your memories are not likely good enough to remember all the details of the experiment, problems that arose, how you solved the problems, sources of error, raw data, analysis procedures, what day this data was taken and what day that data was taken, and “why is this data point so different than the others?”, and “didn’t we retake that data sometime?”, and “why is your graph different than mine?”, and on and on….  It really does pay to keep a thorough notebook.  You should keep raw data, descriptions of the apparatus, procedural details, analysis equations and graphs.  This is a repository of all that you will need to write the formal report.  We use the computer heavily for analysis, but still, you should describe the analysis, work out equations, and display salient tables and graphs in the notebook.  I will spot check your notebooks periodically.

·         Poster Presentations

During the last week of class you will present a professional quality poster of one of your favorite projects at a departmental poster session.

·         Colloquia

About every few weeks the department holds a colloquium on a current topic in physics.  As advanced physics students we hope you will find these presentations interesting and reinforcing of the concepts you are learning.  Attendance at colloquia is a requirement of the course. 

 ·         Grading

Honor Code

As in all of your courses, you are bound by the honor code.  Your laboratory experiences will be collaborative, and thus you will share data with your partner as long as both partners participated in taking the data.  You may also consult on the analysis, though each student must do their own version of the analysis.  This, by the way, is a great way to find and correct mistakes. The writing of the formal report is to be done individually, though you may discuss your writing, data, analysis, etc., with your partner.  You are not allowed to discuss or share work with your neighbors during quizzes.

Special Considerations

Any student with physical or learning disabilities that requires special attention in lab or on exams is encouraged to discuss their needs with the instructor.

To help in your choice of experiments, refer to the listing on the sheet: PHYSICS 325 EXPERIMENTS , where a brief description of each experiment is given, along with the faculty member who is supervising that experiment. 

The schedule of experiment sessions follows--the dates are given. Fill in the blanks in the first class period with the experiments you choose to do. (You'll work this out with Professor Crawford and the rest of the class.) 

• Course Schedule 
• Listing of Experiments
• Lab Assignments : Who's doing what lab, and when .
• Project Status Report Sheet html or MS Word doc
• Example Template for Report
• Template for Poster
• Lab Notebook Checklist
  
• Send Mail to Entire Class
• Useful Links and Reference Sources
• Electronic Access to Science Journals at Musselman Library
• Haystack Radio Astronomy Experiments for a Small Radio Telescope