Welcome to PHYS 471 at CCNY

This is the course page for City College Course PHYS 471, Advanced Physics Lab II, in the SPRING 2022 semester

The course syllabus is here: Syllabus

General Structure

In this course, you will get to perform some classic physics experiments that helped usher in the physics of the 20'th century. The semester will be divided into three general sections: Electrons, Optics, and the Quantum. Each section has two experiments that you and a partner will do together, and then submit individual reports. (That means you will have the same data, but you should have different words & figures. )

Part 0: Intro

Some preliminaries to get up to speed with coding/data.

Part 1: Electrons

  • Exp 1 - E/M: Measure the ratio of the charge of the electron to its mass. Read more →
  • Exp 2 - Millikan Oil Drop: Determine the fundamental unit of charge. Read more →
  • Part 1: wrap up. Use your two values from the previous two experiments to calculate the mass of an electron. Include your range of total uncertainty.

Part 2: Light

  • Exp 3 - Interferometer: Determine the index of refraction of air and glass. Read more →
  • Exp 4 - Microwave Optics: Play with (large λ) light. Read more →

Part 3: Quantum/Choose your own adventure

  • Exp 5 - Photoelectric Effect: Is Light a corpuscle? Read more →

Tutorials/Guides

  1. Colab - Getting started
  2. Plot and fit some simple data
  3. Some basics regarding error in physics measurements

Lab Schedule

Use the link below to go to the schedule. When you and your partner have agreed upon a time, make a comment on the page. I will add you to the time slot you have indicated.

Schedule →

The Lab Staff

The Chief College Laboratory Technician that will be part of this class is Robert (Bob) Suhoke. He knows these experiments very well and will help during your lab times.

Report Template

Please use this overleaf template to prepare reports: Latex Template

Your reports should be nice pdfs (like this) with images and plots in them (not as separate files or link). For some, you will need to link to external

Course Schedule and Materials

The schedule is subject to change, but this represents the most likely dates for those items.

Date Topic In class Assignment Extras
Jan 31 Intro Slides B field exp The Craft
Feb 7 Electrons
Feb 14 Error Colab NB
Feb 21
Feb 28 Light Slides Report due (either exp 1 or 2)
Mar 7 COLAB NB (plotting)
Mar 14 Report due (either exp 1 or 2)
Mar 21 Distributions Slides Mini-Project
Mar 28
Apr 4
Apr 11
Apr 18
Apr 25
May 2
May 9
May 16

Other information

Physics page for Current Students

Communication

To comply with FERPA guidelines, please use your ccny email to correspond with me. Include your name and section number, and EMPLID if you need administrative actions done.