Course Syllabus for Senior Physics Lab, PHY 4821L

Class Meets in CP251 on TuTh 2:00pm - 4:50pm U01

Professor: Jorge L. Rodriguez

Phone 305.348.0259

Office hours: MF 3:00pm -5:00pm or by appointment

Introduction:

This course is likely the last laboratory course you will take as an undergraduate at FIU. The course is thus intended to extend what you've already learned in intro and modern physics laboratory courses to prepare you for graduate studies in physics or employment in industry or government. As apposed to your prior lab courses you will also be expected to work much more independently in the perparation and execution of your experiments. For the most part you will need to perform your own research to sort out how to do the experiment and how to write the lab report. The lab instructor is there to help you but not to provide you with detailed instructions. In this class we want to emphasize the production of research quality work so the student is expected to pay particular attention to the collecting and analyzing of data, the proper handling of errors including the estimation of systematics errors, and conduct requisite statistical analysis. In the end the final product is supposed to be a research quality report that could be submitted to a physics journal.

The class will be conducted in the following way: Each student, working in teams, will be presented with a series of experiments (listed below) over the semester. The experiments will be conducted with minimal instruction from the professor to stimulate the need for and emphasis of independent research. Within each team the students collaborate but each will be responsible for their own research papers. DO NOT TURN IN THE SAME PAPER as your lab partner. Each research paper should be written to the standards of a typical modern physics journal each which impose a specific set of style and formatting requirements that are strictly adhered to. The student can choose from amongst the various styles of publications in use today. The particular type-setting or word processing application used is up to the student. Applications such as latex or tex provide the "best looking" papers that produce extreemly consistent manuscripts. These type setting application though are difficult to use to those who have not done this before. I recommend that if you do not have a latex or tex template that you use whatever word processing software you are familiar with; MS word or Openoffice are pefectly fine. Please help yourself to any one of the periodicals located at the very top of the cabinets in the east wall of the lab.

Please note that this is a three credit UPPER LEVEL class and you will be expected to put in the corresponding amount of effort.

Grading Scale

Your final grade will be based on the scores you recieved throughout the semester mostly on your lab reports which are each given equal weight. The final presentation is also given equal weight to the lab reports. At the end of the class you will take the Physics Major Field test. Everyone must take this exam but your overall course grade will not be inpacted negatively unless you fail to take the exam or do not take it seriously. The final grade scoring used is based on the standard departmental grading scale which is a modified FIU scale as follows:

Letter Grade	Course Grade
A	90 or more
A-	85-89
B+	80-84
B	75-79
B-	70-74
C+	65-69
C	60-64
C-	55-59
D+	50-54
D	45-49
D-	40-44
F	39 or below

Course Textbook and Recommended Reference Material

In this course there is no required text but three books are highly recommended, in order they are:

1. "Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences 3rd Edition" (ISBN: 0072472278) by Philp R. Bevington and D. Keith Robinson This is a classic and every experimentalist should have a copy of their own. The latest edition of this book is well worth the cost. It even describes in detail some of the experiments we'll do in class, particularly the MC experiemnt.
2. "Experiments in Modern Physics 2nd Edition" (ISBN: 0124898513) by A.C. Melissinos and J. Napolitano. This is another classic and is highly recommended. The book describes in detal some of the more challenging experiments in the course including the Millikan Oil Drop experiment. It also has a nice section that summarizes the theory of probability and statistics as applied to measurement.
3. "Measurements and their Uncertainties" (ISBN: 019956633X) by Ifan G. Hughes & Thomas P.A. Hase. Another excellent reference on experimental techniques and measurements.

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.

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. I've attached below a couple of recent paper examples from Journals: A Physical Review Letters (PRL) paper on yet another discrepancy between the recent faster than light neutrino results and known physics PhysRevLett.107.251801.pdf and a recent paper on Upsilon resonance production at the LHC by the CMS collaboration PhysRevD.83.112004.pdf. Look to these as samples of what I expect. In addition, the arxiv.org website also has many tex templates most of which I will accept. You may also search the APS site for word templates if you so desire or create your own based on the sample paper attached below. I will add templates as I find them to this twiki. There is some freedom in how you layout your paper but please consult the PRL or PR(A-Z) guideline for proper formatting and rules regarding the layout. Your report should include these sections:

• Abstract: A one to two paragraph statement with a short description of what it is you are doing, how you are doing it and a summary of the results. The idea is to provide the reader with enough information to make him/her want to read the paper and whether its worth his/her while.
• Introduction: Here you will introduce the paper, described what is being measured in detail and why it is interesting. Background information should be included in this section and any theoretical motivation for the work. This section will likely be the most heavily referenced so make sure you cite your sources.
• Experimental Procedure: Describe the experimental setup in detail and, the function of the equipment used and the procedure used to make the measurements. Include figures, drawing or refer to manuals if used. Also summarize any difficulties experienced during the taking of measurements. You should also mention here the steps taken to minimize your experimental uncertainties.
• Results: Describe completely the result obtained from the measurements. Included a summary of important final calculations, include tables, plots and and statistical analysis including parameter estimates, goodness of fits and other relevant statistical information. A description of your uncertainties; ie., sources how they were estimated and/or computed should be summarized in this section.
• Conclusion and Discussion: Here you state the meaning of your results and relate them to theoretical predictions or other existent measurements. You should also discuss possible improvements to the experimental procedure especially if your results are inconsistent with other results or have poor precision, ie., large uncertainties. The latter provide some idea on how to believe precision can be improved.
• References: See sample paper for format. You may use websites but please keep these to a minimum.
• Appendix: This is where you would include detailed calculations or programs.

A grading rubric GradingRubric will be applied to each lab using the criteria above to asses your performance. Your lab reports (papers) grade will constitute 80% of your final 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.

You can use the Journal of Physics: Conference Series guidelines to format you papre in. But if you prefer to use some other physics journal guidelines you are more than welcomed to do that instead. We provide below zip files with the guideline/templates from the JPC for your convenience.

Presentation

At the end of the semester, you will be required to give a 20 minute presentation on one of the experiments you did or a topic of your choosing related to some physics of interest to you. In the past students have presented work they've participated in during Summer research projects at FIU or elsewhere. For example: at Jefferson Lab, with the Biophysics group etc.,. Last semester someone presented a talk on the Physics of Fighting which I found rather interesting. In any case and to avoid conflicts all students need to have their topics approved by me before you present. The presentation will be graded and will constitute 15% of your course grade. The ability to convey and communicate your topic through oral presentations is a critical part of work as a physicist.

The presentaion schedule and topic PresentationSchedule

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.

List of Available Labs (Lab due dates are posted in the PHY4821LSchedule topic. Late lab grades will decrease over time)

Field	Topic	Refrences and Links		Laboratory Instructions	Students
Computational Physics	Monte Carlo Methods, Binomial Statistics, Errors, Uncertainties and fittin	There are sections in both recommended texts related to this lab. Mellison's has a nice section on probability and statistics, distributions, fitting functions and so does Bevingon and Robinson. Other sources and links: Helpful information on how to gain access and use the physics server medianoche HowToAccessComputing, A recommend data analysis package which incorperate the cernlib minuit fitter (one of many precursers to root): The MN_FIT data analysis package, The full blown root data analysis pacakge The root data analysis framework , and Dr. Boeglin's, collection of python scripts and libraries (Labtools) http://wanda.fiu.edu/boeglinw/LabTools/doc/		MonteCarloLab
Statistics and Probability Distributions	Uncertainties, Poisson and Gaussian statistics	"Experiments in Modern Physics" 2nd ed. by Mellisinos & Napolitano. Other sources, Poisson Statistics,Poisson fitter, Counting Statistics,[XYZ of Oscilloscopes (Tektronix intro manual)]]		CountingLab
Fundemental Constants	Millikan Oil Drop Experiment	A nice description of this lab is available from Mellisinos & Napolitao 2nd ed. Millikan's orignal paper		MilikanLab
E&M	Magnetic Torque & Gyromagnetic ratio	Teachspin website: Magnetic Torque		MagneticTorqueLab
E&M	Magnetic Force	Teachspin website: Magnetic Force		MagneticForceLab
NMR	Pulsed NMR, finding FID	Teachspin website: Pulsed NMR		NMagneticResonanceLab
Astro/particle physics	Cosmic Ray Flux distribution			CosmicRayLab

-- JorgeRodriguez - 2012-01-02

• PhysRevLett.107.251801.pdf: A recent PRL paper on the faster than light neutrino results obtained last September by the OPERA collaboration.

• PhysRevD.83.112004.pdf: A recent PRD paper from the CMS collaboration on Upsilon production at the LHC. This longer paper includes lots of figures, tables and equations.

• LaTeXTemplates.zip: Lab paper template/guidelines for latex

• wordguidelines.zip: Lab paper template/guidelines for word