Course Information
Senior Physics Lab, PHY-4801L
Spring 2009
Dr. Brian Raue

General
The Senior Lab course is intended to introduce you to modern research techniques. You will also learn how to do research quality measurements and error analysis. During the course of the semester, you will do several experiments that will require you to set up the apparatus and do measurements. You will analyze the data you took and prepare a scientific report on the results including error analysis and conclusions from the measurements. Some experiments may require several weeks to complete, some may only take one or two weeks.

This is a three credit UPPER LEVEL class and you will be expected to put in the effort equivalent to what you would put into any other such class.

Instructor
Brian A. Raue Office: CP 217
Office Hours: M-Th 9:00-12:00 or by appointment
Phone: 305-348-3958
E-mail: baraue@sarah.fiu.edu

Lab Notebooks
You should purchase a bound notebook to keep detailed notes about the experiments that you are working on. You should include data that you obtained, notes about the techniques, lists of references, etc. Notes should be dated so that you can cross reference things in the notebook with other materials you may get or produce during you experiments. A good researcher usually has five times as much information in the notebook than needed--but you never can be sure what you are going to need once you sit down to analyze your data.

To encourage this practice, lab notebooks will be collected from time to time and inspected for completeness. Your notebook will constitute 5% of your grade.

Lab Reports
After you complete taking data on a given project you will have about one week to complete the report for the lab. The reports should resemble a journal paper. Each report should have an introduction, a description of the procedures and equipment used, a description of analysis procedures, tables and/or graphs of the data collected, and a discussion of the results. Proper use of significant figures and statistical analysis is expected. All graphs and tables should be well labeled and properly displayed. You should cite all references used in a bibliography.  This link shows an example of a paper written by me and some students that was submitted for publication.  Your reports are probably not going to be this long and the layout can be different, but it gives you an idea of what to do.  Here is a link to the grading from used to evaluate your reports.

The lab report grade will constitute 80% of your grade for the course.  Reports will generally be due one week after you have completed the experiment. Reports that are late will have their grade reduced by one letter grade if not turned in on the due date and one letter grade for each week beyond that: An "A" turns into an "F" after four weeks.

Presentation
At the end of the semester, you will be required to give a 20 minute presentation on one of the experiments you did. In order to avoid having no more than two students give a presentation on a given topic, you must get approval from me for your topic. Topics will be first come, first served. The talk will make up 10% of your course grade. The ability to convey the procedures and results of an experiment in a talk are a critical part of being a good experimental physicist.

Exit Exam
To comply with state-mandated requirements, all students will be required to take an "exit exam".  This exam covers everything in the FIU undergraduate physics curriculum: Modern Physics, Mechanics, E&M, Thermodynamics, and Quantum Mechanics.  The exam is worth 5% of your final grade.

Schedule
You will be rotating through the various labs on a schedule to be determined by your interests and the availability of equipment. The number of labs you complete will depend on the difficulty level of the labs, so it may be that you will not be required to do every lab on the list. Some of the labs are required for all students. I will discuss with each of you individually which labs you will do. Once we have determined what you will be working on, we will fill in the schedule. In a rare case, you might work in one of the other professors' research lab. In such cases, I will schedule meeting times between you and the professor.

Field	Topic	References	Students	Date	Due
Computational Physics	Monte Carlo techniques	Presented  in class	All	Jan. 5	Jan. 19
Statistics and uncertainties	Poisson and Gaussian statistics	Poisson Statistics, Chi-square ,Onlne fitting routine	All	Jan. 12	Feb. 2
Fundamental Constants	Speed of Light Measurement
Fundamental Constants	Miliken Oil Drop Experiment	Presented in class, manual available in lab.
Fundamental Constants	Cavendish measurement of G
Classical Mechanics	Forced and Damped Oscillations
Nuclear & Particle Physics	Angular dependence of cosmic ray flux	Cosmic Rays I
Nuclear & Particle Physics	Muon Lifetime
Condensed Matter Physics	Precision current and voltage measurements
Instrumentation	Building a computer interface for Muon Lifetime experiment
Instrumentation	Photodiode color filter
Electricity & Magnetism Instrumentation	Radio Frequency Tuner
Electricity & Magnetism Instrumentation	Hertz's Experiment: Discovery of EM waves.	The Discovery of Radio Waves The Discovery of Radio Waves - 1888
Electricity & Magnetism Instrumentation	Magnetic field of common AC appliances
Hardware	Construction of a Stirling Engine
More experiments will be added to this list as the semester progresses

Supplimental Materials

1. Examples of technical/engineering drawings for a Pop Can van de Graaff Generator.
   

Academic Integrity
You are expected to fully participate in the execution of the experiments and the collection of the data. You must write your own lab report. If there is evidence that you did not actively participate in the collection of the data presented in your report or that your report is not in your own words, you will be considered to have committed academic misconduct. The minimum penalty will be an "F" on the report in question. All students should be familiar with the FIU Student Code of Standards.