This is a senior laboratory course offering experiments in optics, electromagnetism, modern physics and nuclear physics. It is a free-form laboratory in which students are required to innovate their own experiments based on existing equipment already in place.
The aim of this course is to expose you to a research oriented laboratory. You will be provided with equipment and a small amount of written material (orange folders) which can form the starting point for each project. You should start each project by reading the material we provide and then read additional information from other sources, such as the library. You have to deciding precisely what you want to investigate and how to do it. The same apparatus can be used to perform different investigations by simply varying the technique. In the process of your planning, you may consider how you can improve the precision of the measurements you will make, and is there an innovative approach or technique that will improve your results? If you need any additional equipment to implement your ideas, we will try to provide it, or even have it built for you.
Tuesdays and Thursdays, 14:00-16:50, room P146
| Period | Activity | Sign-up (14:00) | Written/Oral Report |
| January 9 | orientation | ||
| January 11 - February 6 | experiment 1 | January 9 | February 12, 17:00 |
| February 8 - March 13 | experiment 2 | February 6 | March 19, 17:00 |
| March 15 - April 10 | experiment 3 | March 13 | (sign-up by 6 Feb. 14:15) |
Attendance will be recorded. Additional unsupervised laboratory time (during daytime hours) can be arranged with the teaching assistants. They must be satisfied that progress has been made prior to the request and that you sufficiently understand the use of the equipment.
| 15% | attendance and participation | (3 experiments at 5% each) |
| 15% | log books | (3 experiments at 5% each) |
| 40% | written reports | (first 2 experiments at 20% each) |
| 15% | oral report | (last experiment) |
| 15% | class presentation | (any 1 of the 3 experiments) |
For the oral report, you will be asked to explain the experiment and its results in an informal discussion with only the professors and TAs (no fellow students or laboratory partners). The analysis of the data must be completed as would be the case for a written report. You may prepare any diagrams and graphs you require to explain your results. Roughly 20 minutes will be set aside for each student.
Your oral class presentation to the class will be 20 minutes long and will typically discuss one of your first two experiments. Partners may not talk on the same experiment. There will be a penalty for not attending and participating in the presentations of your fellow classmates.
You will be asked to sign-out equipment manuals and these must be returned upon completion of the associated lab.
Computer accounts and pass cards for using the computer laboratory are available from Terry Singleton in P234.
Before starting any experiment, read the manuals and associated literature provided to identify potential hazards and possible damage to equipment. Many of the experiments have an element of danger associated with them and some precautions should be observed. There are, for example, lasers, ionizing radiation, high voltages, and toxic chemicals in use. If you are uncertain about an element of safety or are not comfortable with some equipment or procedure, please bring this to the attention of one of the laboratory instructors.
Unlike earlier laboratory courses in physics, the experiments and equipment for PHYS397 have not been selected to be student proof or to give immediate results. We suggest you do some rough preliminary tests to obtain a feel for the experiment and to debug any problems. Make suitable revisions or improvements until you can obtain final satisfactory results.
At least one of the instructors will know about the basic operation for each piece of the equipment. We can help with trouble-shooting and the theory behind the equipments operation.
Bob Stein is the technician responsible for locating and setting out equipment for the laboratory. He should be available during the laboratory hours. See him regarding any additional equipment that you require. If it is a significant amount of equipment, please fill out an equipment request form so that the equipment can be set out for another day. Students should not expect that equipment can be made available on a same-day basis.
There are many expensive and sophisticated pieces of equipment used in the laboratory. Damaged equipment cost money to repair or replace. If you damage equipment we may not be able to replace or repair the equipment during the laboratory term, or possible, even during the next years' class.Never take equipment from another group without asking the people concerned. If you desperately need what they have, check with Bob Stein to determine if duplicate equipment is available or some other arrangements can be made. You are also expected to clean up your work site for the next group after finishing an experiment.
Finally, performing experiments can be fun -- some of us choose to do it for a living. Setting up an experiment, getting complex apparatus to work, and obtaining good results, that can be compared with the accepted thinking, can be a very rewarding experience. We hope that you enjoy yourself and we are open to any suggestions you may have to improve the laboratory course.
| Frank Hegmann | Professor | P511A | 7852 | hegmann@phys.ualberta.ca |
| Doug Gingrich | Professor | CSR208 | 9501 | gingrich@ualberta.ca |
| Alf Keen | UGL Staff | P312 | 3097 | keen@phys.ualberta.ca |
| Leona Laddish | UGL Staff | P329 | 5881 | laddish@phys.ualberta.ca |
| Blaine Dowler | Teaching Assistant | P132 | 0668 | wdowler@phys.ualberta.ca |
| Bob Stein | UGL Shop | P236 | 1072 | bob@phys.ualberta.ca |
| Len Wampler | Electronics Shop | CSR106 | 3043 | lenw@phys.ualberta.ca |
| Dave Austen | UGL Coordinator | P230 | 3305 | dja@phys.ualberta.ca |
| Terry Singleton | Tech. Supervisor, UGL | P234 | 5878 | terry@phys.ualberta.ca |
The log book constitutes a permanent record of your laboratory work. You may view the log book as a diary which chronicles your laboratory work. The purpose of keeping a log book in this course is to allow each of you to develop good habits in keeping a log book for a research experiment. The requirements of this course are not exactly what you might do in a research experiment.
Often in a research experiment, there is one log book for the entire experiment. We ask each partner of the experiment to keep their own log book. You may use un-filled log books from previous courses. In addition, we request that you own two log books so that you can record your work in one while we are reading the other. The log book is to be submitted together with the written reports and accompany you during your oral presentation. The log books will be graded.
It is often difficult to know ahead of time which information is relevant and should be recorded, and which is not. Only with experience will you be able strike a balance between writing down everything and not recording key information. I suggest you error on the side of writing too much. Often what we thought was irrelevant to write down at the time turns out to be essential during the analysis and reporting of the experiment.
Record your observations directly into your log book in ink. If only your partner recorded the results in their log book, make a Xerox copy and glue it into your book. Record what you see. Do not manipulate numbers before you record them. Do not delete what you have written. If you do not think it is relevant, cross it out (so it can still be read) or make a note of why it was rejected. Often, after the dust settles, we find ourselves going back to what we thought at the time was irrelevant. Include diagrams which detail the particulars of your setup. Include enough commentary so that you could reproduce your setup or explain your observations to a colleague in the distant future. Explain the procedures used and include the reasoning that went into selecting them. Show your work. Include rough calculations and graphs. Complete references to library material should be included. Materials duplicated from reference books, raw computer output, and analysis you develop on your own should be glued into your log book. We encourage you to sign and date (including year) every page of your log book.
As an experimenter, you should make a clear separation among the roles of design, observation and analysis.
We require you to present an oral report to the class on one of the experiments you completed. Your talk should be 15 minutes. The aim of the talks is to give you practice in presenting your work orally to a group colleagues.
Your talk should consist of an introduction and the background needed to understand the theory, the experiment set up, and the results obtained. You results should be discussion in the context of the expected results and possible limitations of the equipment. You should explain why the experiment was an interesting learning experience, whether it may have confirmed some physical law, or that in fact it showed how difficult it was to confirm the expected law. Also explain what was achieved and what could have been achieved, given the limitations under which you worked. Try to provide realistic suggestions for improvements that the next group might try, and for that matter, pitfalls they should be aware of.
While preparing your talk, focus on logical organization and clarity. Do not spend too much time organizing high-tech presentations. Here are a few presentation techniques you may want to consider.
The purpose of the reports is to show that you have developed and performed an experiment. It is also our way of accessing that you understand what you have done, have employed good experiment techniques, judgment, and analysis methods. In addition, the reports are meant to help develop your written communication skills. It is therefore desirable that your reports demonstrate good grammar, including spelling, sentence structure, and consistent tense.
The reports should be in the format and style of a scientific paper. However, we ask that your report be more complete than a scientific paper. It should be readable by your fellow students and contain enough information (along with your log book) to allow one to reproduce the experiment. To avoid the reports being an infinite sink of your time, we restrict the length of the text portion of the report to 10 single spaced pages; excluding the title page, bibliography, appendices, tables, graphs and diagrams. Please notice that you can still obtain an excellent grade without filling 10 pages.
Since scientific journals differ in specific grammatical requirements, we do not ask you to choose a particular tense (such as passive voice) when writing nor choose a particular format. We do ask that you be consistent within your report. Your report should present a logical description of what you have done, how you have done it, and what conclusions can be drawn. The most important requirement is that the presentation be logical and consistent. It is important that your report is readable, meaning that others should be able to read it from beginning to end without having to turn pages back and forth in order to make sense of the report. Ideally, your report should be comprehensible to one of your fellow students. Do not assume the reader is intimately familiar with the topic you are explaining.
Your report should explain:
Your report should also include a brief statement of:
Organize your report into sections. You should have an abstract and conclusions section. The main body of the report may be divided with such titles as Introduction, Theory, Experiment Design, Method, Analysis, Results, etc. Finish off with a bibliography and any appendices. The abstract, as well as, the conclusions sections should be independent. One should be able to read these sections by themselves and understand what the experiment is about. Discuss problems encountered as well as successes. The report should contain a summary of your analysis in the form of graphs wherever possible or tables when graphs are not appropriate.
The text of the report should be done with a word processor but equations may be inserted by hand. Please number your pages and equations, as it is much easier to give comments on the report when we can refer to text and equations by number. Theory usually involves quoting the relevant equations you tested and the mathematical symbols you are using to describe the physical quantities involved. If you derive results yourself, include them in an appendix rather than deriving them in the main portion of the report. Graphs should appear near to the corresponding discussion in the body of the report. Raw data need not be duplicated from your log book. Data for graphs are best left to an appendix. Be sure to reference any textbook, article, or write-up which you use. Please include a numbered bibliography at the end of the report which lists the references used.