2012

Instructors

Professor: Tobias Marriage (marriage@pha.jhu.edu), Office: Bloomberg 215

TAs: Christopher Brust (cbrust@pha.jhu.edu), Sean Cantrell (seancan@pha.jhu.edu)

General Description

Welcome to the Advanced Physics Lab. In this class, you will carry out six experiments, some of which helped form the basis for modern physics. More importantly, you'll learn

• how to carry out an experiment with special attention to systematic and statistical measurement errors,
• how to model data from that experiment and understand errors on model parameters,
• and how to present your work through scientific writing.

These three aspects essentially define the course.

Groups

In the first week students divide into 10 groups of 2-3 students each. Sign onto the wiki and add your names to the 2011 Groups list.

Schedule

Lab times: Mondays 10:00-12:50, 13:30-16:20. You may come to either (or both) class periods. This is essentially when the professor and TAs will be available (note both TAs will not be present at both sessions).

Each lab takes two weeks and therefore has two associated lab periods. Before the first lab period you submit an overview of the experiment and the procedure (essentially a draft of the introduction and the experiment sections of your report) and then you begin the experiment. Bring a copy of this and discuss the experiment with the professor and/or the TAs -- this will make sure you don't make any silly mistakes and lose you time. The next week you should have an initial analysis done of your data. You should come to the lab in order to discuss your results with the professor and/or TAs.

Jan 30

Welcome Lecture

Feb 6

First Lab Begins

Feb 13

Latex Tutorial

Feb 20

Second Lab Begins

Feb 28

Second Lab Presentations

Mar 5

Third Lab Begins (Due the day after Spring break ends)

Mar 19

Spring Break

Mar 26

Fourth Lab Begins

Apr 9

Fifth Lab Begins

Apr 18

Fifth Lab Presentations

Apr 23

Sixth Lab Begins (Due the day after reading period)

Grading

Grades breakdown as

• 80% Labs
• 10% Preparation,
• 10% Tutorials/Background Work

Collaboration Policy

Execution of the experiment is a group effort, so is necessarily collaborative. Furthermore, students are encourage to discuss experiments, analysis, and other course related issues with their peers (and, of course, with the instructors). However, each person should carry out their own data analysis (e.g., no code sharing), produce their own plots, and write their own report. Violations of academic ethics (e.g., plagiarism) will be handled according to JHU policy. See http://www.jhu.edu/design/oliver/academic_manual/ethics.html.

Work Submission

We'll utilize Dropbox (www.dropbox.com) for submission of reports: each student will have a private dropbox by which to upload course materials for submission (and by which we can share files with you). If the dropbox fails, work may be emailed in PDF format to the instructor at marriage@pha.jhu.edu.

The reports are due by midnight on the day before the "submitted" date in the schedule above. Each student is allowed one late report, which may be up to one week late.

Recommended Texts

• Bevington & Robinson, Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences
• Press, Teukolsky, Vetterling, Flannery, Numerical Recipes in C (Available online)
• Lamport, LaTeX: A Document Preparation System

Lab Reports

Lab reports constitute the backbone of the course. The reports are to be created on a computer with computer generated graphics, plots, etc. The document preparation system for the reports is LaTeX. The computers in the PUC lab have various installations of LaTeX editors/compilers. You can also download freeware for your personal computers. The lab reports should have an abstract, an introduction, description of the experiment (apparatus and procedure), description of the analysis, discussion of results, a conclusion (including future directions), and a bibliography. Lab reports will be collected on even weeks (See schedule.).

The course is fast paced and you'll want to stay ahead of schedule. You should begin writing your lab report in the first week of the class. You should plan to have the introduction finished by the end of the first week together with first drafts of all figures. A standard strategy is to create your figures first in order to guide the body of the text.

Labs

Responsibility for assistance and grading of labs will be split between the professor and TAs.

The labs are done in groups according to the following schedule:

Schedule 2012