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Copyright (c) 1999-2008 by B. Crowell and V. Roundy. This lab manual is subject to the Open Publication
License on page 178. If you do not agree to the license, then you do not have permission to copy the
manual. The lab manual is available for downloading from www.lightandmatter.com, and a copy of the
Open Publication License is also available at opencontent.org.
Contents
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Interactions . . . . . . . . . . . .
Kinematics . . . . . . . . . . . .
Free Fall . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Earths Gravitational Field . . . .
Newtons Second Law . . . . . . . .
Air Friction . . . . . . . . . . . .
Vector Addition of Forces . . . . . . .
Acceleration In Two Dimensions . . . .
Conservation Laws . . . . . . . . .
Conservation of Energy . . . . . . .
Conservation of Momentum . . . . . .
Torque . . . . . . . . . . . . .
Absolute Zero . . . . . . . . . . .
The Clement-Desormes Experiment . . .
The Pendulum . . . . . . . . . . .
Resonance . . . . . . . . . . . .
Resonance (short version for physics 222) .
Standing Waves . . . . . . . . . .
Resonances of Sound . . . . . . . .
Static Electricity . . . . . . . . . .
The Oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . .
The Speed of Sound . . . . . . . . .
Electrical Resistance . . . . . . . .
The Loop and Junction Rules . . . . .
Electric Fields . . . . . . . . . . .
Magnetism (Physics 206/211) . . . . .
The Dipole Field (Physics 222) . . . . .
The Earths Magnetic Field (Physics 222) .
Relativity . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Charge to Mass Ratio of the Electron.
Energy in Fields . . . . . . . . . .
RC Circuits . . . . . . . . . . . .
LRC Circuits . . . . . . . . . . .
Faradays Law . . . . . . . . . . .
Electromagnetism . . . . . . . . .
Impedance . . . . . . . . . . . .
Refraction and Images . . . . . . . .
Geometric Optics . . . . . . . . . .
Two-Source Interference . . . . . . .
Wave Optics . . . . . . . . . . .
Polarization . . . . . . . . . . . .
The Photoelectric Effect . . . . . . .
Electron Diffraction . . . . . . . . .
The Hydrogen Atom . . . . . . . .
The Michelson Interferometer . . . . .
Appendix 1: Format of Lab Writeups . .
Appendix 2: Basic Error Analysis . . . .
Appendix 3: Propagation of Errors . . .
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Appendix
Appendix
Appendix
Appendix
Appendix
Appendix
Appendix
4: Graphing . . . . . . . . .
5: Finding Power Laws from Data .
6: Using the Photogate . . . . .
7: Using a Multimeter . . . . .
8: High Voltage Safety Checklist .
9: Laser Safety Checklist . . . .
10: The Open Publication License .
Contents
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168
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180
Contents
Interactions
Apparatus
Goal
Form hypotheses about interactions and test them.
Introduction
Why does a rock fall if you drop it? The ancient
Greek philosopher Aristotle theorized that it was because the rock was trying to get to its natural place,
in contact with the earth. Why does a ball roll if you
push it? Aristotle would say that only living things
have the ability to move of their own volition, so the
ball can only move if you give motion to it. Aristotles explanations were accepted by Arabs and Europeans for two thousand years, but beginning in the
Renaissance, his ideas began to be modified drastically. Today, Aristotelian physics is discussed mainly
by physics teachers, who often find that their students intuitively believe the Aristotelian world-view
and strongly resist the completely different version
of physics that is now considered correct. It is not
uncommon for a student to begin a physics exam
and then pause to ask the instructor, Do you want
us to answer these questions the way you told us was
true, or the way we really think it works? The idea
of this lab is to make observations of objects, mostly
magnets, pushing and pulling on each other, and to
figure out some of the corrections that need to be
made to Aristotelian physics.
Some people might say that its just a matter of
definitions or semantics whether Aristotle is correct
or not. Is Aristotles theory even testable? One
testable feature of the theory is its asymmetry. The
Aristotelian description of the rock falling and the
Lab 1
Interactions
Observations
The following important rules serve to keep facts
separate from opinions and reduce the chances of
getting a garbled copy of the data:
(1) Take your raw data in pen, directly into your lab
notebook. This is what real scientists do. The point
is to make sure that what youre writing down is
a first-hand record, without mistakes introduced by
recopying it. (If you dont have your two lab notebooks yet, staple todays raw data into your notebook when you get it.)
(2) Everybody should record their own copy of the
raw data. Do not depend on a group secretary.
(3) If you do calculations during lab, keep them on
a separate page or draw a line down the page and
keep calculations on one side of the line and raw
data on the other. This is to distinguish facts from
inferences.
Because this is the first meeting of the lab class,
there is no prelab writeup due at the beginning of
the class. Instead, you will discuss your results with
Lab 1
Interactions
Self-Check
Do all your analysis in lab, including error analysis
for part C. Error analysis is discussed in appendices
2 and 3; get help from your instructor if necessary.
Analysis
In your writeup, present your results from all four
parts of the experiment, including error analysis for
part C.
Analysis
The most common mistake is to fail to address the
point of the lab. If you feel like you dont understand
why you were doing any of this, then you were missing out on your educational experience! See the back
of the lab manual for the format of lab writeups.
for
Kinematics
Apparatus
Setup
computer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
track . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
dynamics cart . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
fan . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
AA batteries . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4/group
aluminum slugs . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
motion detector . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
protractor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
WD-40
Check that all four wheels on the cart will spin for
about 20-30 seconds if you flick them hard. If they
only spin for a few seconds, see if you can fix the
problem by spraying WD-40 on the bearings.
Set the cart on the track without the fan. Prop
the motion detector (sonar gun) at one end of the
track so that it is aimed slightly upward. This angle
is critical measure 86 above horizontal with the
protractor, and tape it to the backrest.
With the computer turned off, plug the motion detector into the PORT2 plug on the interface box.
Goal
Learn how to relate the motion of an object to its
position-versus-time graph.
Introduction
Analyzing motion is the most fundamental thing we
do in physics. The most versatile way of representing
motion is with a graph that has the objects position
on the upright axis and time on the horizontal axis.
It takes some practice to be able to sketch and interpret these graphs, but once you get used to them,
they become very intuitive.
Apparatus
The object whose motion youll study is a cart that
rolls on a track. You can either push the cart by
hand, start it moving with a shove, or clamp a fan on
top of it to make it speed up or slow down steadily.
To measure the carts motion, youll use a little sonar
gun that sends out clicks. When it hears the echo
from the cart, it figures out how far away the cart
was based on the time delay and the known speed of
sound. The sonar gun is connected to a computer,
which produces a position-versus-time graph.
Start up the computer. For compactness, Ill use notation like this to describe the computer commands:
Start>Programs>Vernier Software>Logger Pro 2
This is the command to start the computer software running. Start means to click on the start
menu at the bottom left corner of the screen, Programs means to select that from the menu, and so
on. There are two different versions of the software
installed; use version 2. (Logger Pro 3 doesnt work
with the interface boxes we have.)
Make sure that the interface box is plugged into
COM1 (the first COM port) at the back of the computer, not COM2. If the computer presents you
with a dialog box saying Set Up Interface, choose
COM1.
Once the program is running, do File>Open, then
go into Probes and Sensors and then into Motion
Detector, and open the file of the same name. At
this point, you may get the following error message,
which you can ignore: This file cannot run properly
with this hardware interface.
Youll get three graphs on the screen, but you only
want one, the x t graph. Click on the x t graph,
and then do View>Graph Layout>One Pane, and
the other two graphs will go away.
If you now click the button to tell it to collect data,
the motion detector should start clicking rapidly,
and it you move the cart back and forth you should
see a graph of its motion. Make sure it is able to
sense the carts motion correctly for distances from
50 cm to the full length of the track. If it doesnt
work when the cart is at the far end of the track,
play with the angle of motion detector a little. If
10
Lab 2
Kinematics
Observations
In parts Athrough E,you dont need to take detailed
numerical data just sketch the graphs in your lab
notebook. All of your graphs will have garbage data
at the beginning and the end, and you need to make
sure you understand whats what.
A Fast and slow motion
Moving the cart by hand, make a graph for slow
motion and another for fast motion. Make sure the
motion is steady, and dont get confused by the parts
of the graph that come before and after your period
of steady pushing. Sketch the graphs and make sure
you understand them.
B Motion in two different directions
Now try comparing the graphs you get for the two
different directions of motion. Again, record what
they look like and figure out what youre seeing.
C Reproducing a graph
Now see if you can produce a graph that looks like
this:
11
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Make a prediction of the four graphs youll obtain in parts A and B.
Self-Check
Do the analysis in lab.
Analysis
At one-second intervals, draw nice long tangent lines
on the curve from part G and determine their slope.
Some slopes will be negative, and some positive.
Summarize this series of changing speeds in a table.
Did the velocity increase by about the same amount
with every second?
12
Lab 2
Kinematics
13
Free Fall
Apparatus
two stations:
Behr free-fall column and weight
plumb bob
spark generator (CENCO)
paper tape
switch for electromagnet
Goal
Find out whether it is v/x or v/t that is constant for an object accelerating under the influence
of gravity.
Introduction
A fundamental and difficult problem in pre-Newtonian physics was the motion of falling bodies. Aristotle had various incorrect but influential ideas on the
subject, including the assertions that heavier objects
fell faster than lighter ones and that the object only
sped up for a short while after it was dropped and
then continued on at a constant speed. Even among
Renaissance scientists who disagreed with Aristotles
claim that the object no longer sped up after a while,
there was a great deal of confusion about whether it
was v/x or v/t that was constant. It seems
obvious to modern physicists that they could not
both be constant, but it was not at all obvious to
authorities such as Domingo de Soto and Albert of
Saxony. Galileo started out thinking they were both
constant, then realized this was mathematically impossible, and finally determined from experiments
that it was v/t, now called acceleration, that was
constant.
The main reason why the confusion persisted for two
thousand years was that the methods for measuring
time were inaccurate, and the time required for an
object to fall was very short. Galileo was able to
make settle the issue because he figured out how to
use a pendulum to measure time accurately, and also
came up with the idea of effectively slowing down the
motion by studying objects rolling down an inclined
plane, rather than objects falling vertically. He then
found how to extrapolate from the case of an object
rolling down an inclined plane at an angle to the
14
Lab 3
Free Fall
A Setup
The apparatus consists of a 2-meter tall column with
a paper tape running down it. A weight is held at the
top with an electromagnet and then released, falling
right next to the paper tape. (An electromagnet
is an artificial magnet that works when you put an
electric current through it, unlike a permanent magnet, which does not require power.) A spark generator is hooked up to the two vertical wires, and as
the weight falls, sparks cross the gap from the first
wire to the metal flange on the weight, then from
the flange to the other wire. Sparks are produced
only briefly, at regular intervals of 1/60 of a sec-
Self-Check
Appendix 4 discusses graphing. The graphing for
this lab is time-consuming without a computer; since
we have a limited number of computers in lab, you
may want to go to one of the other campus computer
labs for this. Determine which quantity is constant.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Consider the quantities x, x, t, and t, which
are measured more or less directly in this lab. Which
of these would have a single value throughout the
whole motion of the falling weight?
P2 Explain, based on the meaning of the symbols
and /, why v/x and v/t have to be notations for numbers, not descriptions of graphs. How
would these two numbers relate to the two graphs?
P3 Suppose that, once you have data, v/x turns
out to be constant, and v/t isnt. Explain how
you would be able to tell this from your graphs.
Analysis
Since the sparks start before you release the electromagnet, the first dot at the very top of the tape will
give the starting position of the weight.
If you consider any adjacent pair of dots (avoiding
the top and bottom ones), then measuring the distance x between them allows you to calculate an
approximation to the speed of the weight, which you
can think of as being its speed at the point half-way
between the two dots.
Make one plot of speed versus time and another of
speed versus distance, preferably using a computer,
since you will have about thirty data points, and it
15
Apparatus
(two stations):
vertical plank with electromagnets
steel balls (2/station)
Linux computers with Audacity installed (in 416T)
spirit levels
Goal
Make a high-precision measurement of the strength
of the Earths gravitational field, g, in Fullerton.
Introduction
When objects fall, and all forces other than gravity are negligible, we observe that the acceleration
is the same, regardless of the objects mass, shape,
density, or other properties. However, the acceleration does depend a little bit where on the earth
we do the experiment, and even bigger variations in
acceleration can be observed by, e.g., going to the
moon. Thus, this acceleration can be considered as
a property of space itself, and we can refer to it as
the gravitational field in that region of space. Just
as you would use a magnetic compass to find out
about the magnetic field in the classroom, you can
use dropping masses to find out about the gravitational field. In this experiment, youll measure the
gravitational field, g, in the classroom to sufficiently
high precision that, if everybody does a good job and
we pool and average everyones data to reduce random errors, we should be able to get a value that is
measurably different from the generic world-average
value you would find in a textbook.
A Measuring g precisely
You will measure g, the acceleration of an object in
free fall, using electronic timing techniques. The idea
of the method is that youll have two steel balls hanging underneath electromagnets at different heights.
Youll simultaneously turn off the two magnets using the same switch, causing the balls to drop at
16
Lab 4
Analysis
You may get this error message: Error while opening sound device. Please check the input device settings and the project sample rate. Quit the program
and restart it.
Self-Check
Extract the value of g, with error bars. Read Appendix 3 for information on how to do error analysis
with propagation of errors; get help from your instructor if necessary.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 If your instructor has assigned homework problem 27 from ch. 3 of Newtonian Physics,dont bother
turning in another copy of your work for this prelab
question. Derive an equation for g in terms of the
quantities youll measure, which are h1 , h2 , and the
time interval t2 t1 . The point of the lab is to
measure g, so dont just say well of course g is 9.8
m/s2 . (You should check your equation by using
the answer checker for the homework problem.)
17
Apparatus
pulley
spirit level
string
weight holders, not tied to string
two-meter stick
slotted weights
stopwatch
foam rubber cushions
of masses, but keep the total amount of mass constant and just divide it differently between the two
holders. Remember to take the masses of the holders
themselves into account. Make sure to perform your
measurements with the longest possible distance of
travel, because you cannot use a stopwatch to get an
accurate measurement of very short time intervals.
The best results are obtained with combinations of
weights that give times of about 4 to 20 seconds.
Also, make sure that the masses are at least a few
hundred grams or so on each side.
Goal
Self-Check
Compare theoretical and experimental values of acceleration for one of your mass combinations. Check
whether they come out fairly consistent.
Observations
Analysis
Use your measured times and distances to find the
actual acceleration, and make a graph of this versus
M m. Show these experimentally determined accelerations as small circles. Overlaid on the same
graph, show the theoretical equation as a line or
curve.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Criticize the following reasoning: The weight
fell 1.0 m in 1 s, so v = 1 m/s, and a = v/t = 1 m/s2 .
Set up unequal masses on the two sides of the pulley,
and determine the resulting acceleration by measuring how long it takes for the masses to move a certain distance. Use the spirit level to make the pulley
vertical; otherwise you get extra friction. Use relatively large masses (typically half a kg or a kg each
side) so that friction is not such a big force in comparison to the other forces, and the inertia of the
pulley is negligible compared to the inertia of the
hanging masses. Do several different combinations
18
Lab 5
19
Air Friction
Apparatus
Your goal in this lab is to find a proportionality relating the force of air friction to the velocity at which
the air rushes over the object. For instance, you may
find the rule
F v
,
which is a shorthand for
Goal
F = (some number)(v)
Introduction
Friction between solid objects occurs all the time in
our daily lives. The frictional force exerted by the air
on a solid object is not as often evident, but it is responsible for the wind blowing our hair, for the slow
dropping of a feather, and for our cars poorer gas
mileage at freeway speeds compared to more moderate speeds.
The latter effect suggests that air friction might increase with speed, unlike solid-solid friction, which is
nearly independent of speed. By Newtons first law,
a car or a jet plane cruising at constant speed must
have zero total force on it, so if the air friction force
gets stronger with speed, that would explain why
a greater forward-pushing force would be needed to
travel at high speeds. For instance, a car traveling
at low speed might have a -10 kN air friction force
pushing backward on it, so in order to have zero total force on it the road must be making a forward
force of +10 kN. At a higher speed, air friction might
increase to -30 kN, so the road would need to make a
forward force of +30 kN. The car convinces the road
to make the stronger force by pushing backward on
the road more strongly: by Newtons third law, the
cars force on the road and the roads force on the
car must be equal in magnitude and opposite in direction. The car burns more gas because it must
20
Lab 6
Air Friction
Observations
There are two possible methods for measuring the
terminal velocity of the filter.
The first method is shown in the figure below. We
use coffee filters because they dont tumble or sway
very much as they fall, and because they allow us to
easily change the mass of our falling object by nesting more coffee filters inside the bottom one, without changing its aerodynamic properties. The filters
will start speeding up when you release them near
the ceiling, but as they speed up, the upward force
of air friction on them increases, until they reach a
speed at which the total force on them is zero. Once
at this speed, they obey Newtons first law and continue at constant speed. If the number of coffee filters is small, they will have reached their maximum
speed within the first half a meter or so. By the
time they are even with the edge of the lab bench,
they are moving at essentially their full speed. You
can then use the stopwatch to determine how long it
takes them to cover the distance to the floor, which
will allow you to find their speed. During this final
part of the fall, you know the upward force of air
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Suppose you tried to do this lab with stacks of
coins instead of coffee filters. Assuming you had a
sufficiently accurate timing device, would it work?
P2
Analysis
Use your raw data to compile a list of F and v values.
Use the methods explained in Appendix 5 to see if
you can find a power-law relationship between F and
v. This will require fitting a line to a set of data, as
explained in appendix 4. Both fitting a line to data
and finding power laws are techniques you will use
several more times in this course, so it is worth your
while to get help now if necessary in order to get
confident with them.
21
Apparatus
force table . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
spirit level . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
weights
string
Goal
Test whether the vector sum of the forces acting on
an object at rest is equal to zero.
Introduction
Modern physics claims that when a bridge, an earthquake fault, or an oak tree doesnt move, it is because the forces acting on it, which combine according to vector addition, add up to zero. Although
this may seem like a reasonable statement, it was
far from obvious to premodern scientists. Aristotle,
for instance, said that it was the nature of each of
the four elements, earth, fire, water and air, to return to its natural location. Rain would fall from
the sky because it was trying to return to its natural location in the lakes and oceans, and once it got
to its natural location it would stop moving because
that was its nature.
When a modern scientist considers a book resting on
a table, she says that it holds still because the force
of gravity pulling the book down is exactly canceled
by the normal force of the table pushing up on the
book. Aristotle would have denied that this was possible, because he believed that at any one moment an
object could have only one of two mutually exclusive
types of motion: natural motion (the tendency of the
book to fall to the ground, and resume its natural
place), and forced motion (the ability of another object, such as the table, to move the book). According
to his theory, there could be nothing like the addition of forces, because the object being acted on was
only capable of following orders from one source at
a time. The incorrect Aristotelian point of view has
great intuitive appeal, and beginning physics students tend to make Aristotelian statements such as,
The tables force overcomes the force of gravity,
as if the forces were having a contest, in which the
victor annihilated the loser.
22
Lab 7
Observations
The apparatus consists of a small circular table, with
a small metal ring held in the middle by the tension
in four strings. Each string goes over a pulley at the
edge of the table, so that a weight can be hung on it
to control the tension. The angles can be recorded
either graphically, by sliding a piece of paper underneath, or by reading angles numerically off of an
angular scale around the circumference of the table.
Use the spirit level to level the table completely using the screws on the feet. Set up four strings with
weights, using the small pin to hold the ring in place.
Adjust the angles or the amounts of weight or both,
until the ring is in equilibrium without the pin, and
is positioned right over the center of the table. Avoid
a symmetric arrangement of the strings (e.g., dont
space them all 90 degrees apart), and dont make any
forces collinear with each other. The ring is an extended object, so in order to treat it mathematically
as a pointlike object you should make sure that all
the strings are lined up with the center of the ring,
as shown in the figure.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
the magnitude of the sum of the forces is small compared to the magnitudes of the individual forces.
Analysis
Calculate the magnitude of vector sum of the forces
on the ring, first graphically and then analytically.
Make sure the two methods give the same result. If
they do not, try measuring the x and y components
off of your drawing and comparing them with the x
and y components you calculated analytically.
Estimate the possible random error in your final
sum.
Are your results consistent with theory, taking into
account the random errors involved?
Self-Check
Do both a graphical calculation and an analytic calculation in lab, without error analysis. Make sure
they give the same result. Do a rough check that
23
Apparatus
air track (small)
cart
photogate (PASCO) (under lab benches in rm. 418)
computer
air blowers
power strips for switching CENCO blowers on and
off
vernier calipers
wood blocks
Goal
Test whether the acceleration of gravity acts like a
vector.
Introduction
As noted in lab 2, one of the tricky techniques Galileo
had to come up with to study acceleration was to
use objects rolling down an inclined plane rather
than falling straight down. That slowed things down
enough so that he could measure the time intervals
using a pendulum clock. Even though you were able,
in lab 4, to use modern electronic timing techniques
to measure the short times involved in a vertical fall,
there is still some intrinsic interest in the idea of
motion on an inclined plane. The reason its worth
studying is that it reveals the vector nature of acceleration.
Vectors rule the universe. Entomologists say that
God must have had an inordinate fondness for beetles, because there are so many species of them.
Well, God must also have had a special place in her
heart for vectors, because practically every natural
phenomenon she invented is a vector: gravitational
acceleration, electric fields, nuclear forces, magnetic
fields, all the things that tie our universe together
are vectors.
Setup
The idea of the lab is that if acceleration really acts
like a vector, then the carts acceleration should equal
the component of the earths gravitational acceleration vector that is parallel to the track, because the
24
Lab 9
Observations
The basic idea is to release the cart at a distance x
away from the photogate. The cart accelerates, and
you can determine its approximate speed, v, when it
passes through the photogate. (See prelab question
P1. Make sure to use vernier calipers to measure the
width of the vane, w.) From v and x, you can find
the acceleration. You will take data with the track
tilted at several different angles, to see whether the
carts acceleration always equals the component of g
parallel to the track.
Self-Check
Find the theoretical and experimental accelerations
for one of your angles, and see if they are roughly
consistent.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Skip this question if the corresponding homework problem from Newtonian Physics has already
been assigned. (a) If w is the width of the vane, and
tb is defined as suggested above, what is the speed of
the cart when it passes through the photogate? (b)
Based on v and x, how can you find a?
P2 Should x be measured horizontally, or along
the slope of the track?
P3 It is not possible to measure accurately with
a protractor. How can be determined based on
the distance between the feet of the air track and
the height of the wood block?
P4 Explain why the following method for finding
the carts acceleration is incorrect. The time I got
off the computer was 0.0237 s. My vane was 2.2 cm
wide, so v = 2.2 cm/.0237 s = 93 cm/s. That means
the acceleration was a = v/t = (vf vi )/t =
(vf 0)/t = vf /t, or 93 cm/s divided by .0237
s, which gives 3900 cm/s2 .
Analysis
Extract the acceleration for each angle at which you
took data. Make a graph with on the x axis and
acceleration on the y axis. Show your measured accelerations as points, and the theoretically expected
dependence of a on as a smooth curve.
Error analysis is not required for this lab, because
the random errors are small compared to systematic
errors such as the imperfect leveling of the track,
friction, warping of the track, and the measurement
of w.
25
10
Conservation Laws
Apparatus
Part A: vacuum pump (Lapine) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
electronic balance (large capacity) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
plastic-coated flask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Part B: beaker . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
propyl alcohol 200 mL/group
canola oil 200 mL/group
funnels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
100-mL volumetric flask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
rubber stopper, fitting in
volumetric flask . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
1-ml pipette and bulb . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
magnetic stirrer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
triple-beam balance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1/group
Goal
People believe that objects cannot be made to disappear or appear. If you start with a certain amount
of matter, there is no way to increase or decrease
that amount. This type of rule is called a conservation law in physics, and this specific law states
that the amount of matter is conserved, i.e., must
stay the same. In order to make this law scientifically useful, we must define more carefully how the
amount of a substance is to be defined and measured numerically. Specifically, there are two issues
that scientifically untrained people would probably
not agree on:
Should air count as matter? If it has weight,
then it probably should count. In this lab, you
will find out if air has weight, and, if so, measure its density.
Should the amount of a substance be defined in
terms of volume, or is mass more appropriate?
In this lab, you will determine whether mass
and/or volume is conserved when water and
alcohol are mixed.
Introduction
Styles in physics come and go, and once-hallowed
principles get modified as more accurate data come
along, but some of the most durable features of the
science are its conservation laws. A conservation law
26
Lab 10
Conservation Laws
is a statement that something always remains constant when you add it all up. Most people have a
general intuitive idea that the amount of a substance
is conserved. That objects do not simply appear
or disappear is a conceptual achievement of babies
around the age of 9-12 months. Beginning at this
age, they will for instance try to retrieve a toy that
they have seen being placed under a blanket, rather
than just assuming that it no longer exists. Conservation laws in physics have the following general
features:
Physicists trying to find new conservation laws
will try to find a measurable, numerical quantity, so that they can check quantitatively whether
it is conserved. One needs an operational definition of the quantity, meaning a definition
that spells out the operations required to measure it.
Conservation laws are only true for closed systems. For instance, the amount of water in a
bottle will remain constant as long as no water is poured in or out. But if water can get in
or out, we say that the bottle is not a closed
system, and conservation of matter cannot be
applied to it.
The quantity should be additive. For instance,
the amount of energy contained in two gallons
of gasoline is twice as much as the amount of
energy contained in one gallon; energy is additive. An example of a non-additive quantity is
temperature. Two cups of coffee do not have
twice as high a temperature as one cup.
Conservation laws always refer to the total amount
of the quantity when you add it all up. If you
add it all up at one point in time, and then
come back at a later point in time and add it
all up, it will be the same.
How can we pin down more accurately the concept
of the amount of a substance? Should a gallon
of shaving cream be considered more substantial
than a brick? At least two possible quantities come
to mind: mass and volume. Is either conserved?
Both? Neither? To find out, we will have to make
measurements.
We can measure mass by the see-saw method
when two children are sitting on the opposite sides
of a see-saw, the less massive one has to move farther out from the fulcrum to make it balance. If we
enslave some particular child as our permanent mass
standard, then any other childs mass can be measured by balancing her on the other side and measuring her distance from the fulcrum. A more practical version of the same basic principle that does
not involve human rights violations is the familiar
pan balance with sliding weights.
Volume is not necessarily so easy to measure. For
instance, shaving cream is mostly air, so should we
find a way to measure just the volume of the bubbly film itself? Precise measurements of volume can
most easily be done with liquids and gases, which
conform to a vessel in which they are placed.
Should a gas, such as air, be counted as having any
substance at all? Empedocles of Acragas (born ca.
492 BC) was the originator of the doctrine that all
material substances are composed of mixtures of four
elements: earth, fire, water and air. The idea seems
amusingly naive now that we know about the chemical elements and the periodic table, but it was accepted in Europe for two thousand years, and the
inclusion of air as a material substance was actually a nontrivial concept. Air, after all, was invisible, seemed weightless, and had no definite shape.
Empedocles decided air was a form of matter based
on experimental evidence: air could be trapped under water in an inverted cup, and bubbles would be
released if the cup was tilted. It is interesting to
note that in China around 300 BC, Zou Yan came
up with a similar theory, and his five elements did
not include air.
Does air have weight? Most people would probably
say no, since they do not feel any physical sensation
of the atmosphere pushing down on them. A delicate
house of cards remains standing, and is not crushed
to the floor by the weight of the atmosphere.
Compare that to the experience of a dolphin, though.
A dolphin might contemplate a tasty herring suspended in front of it and conjecture that water had
no weight, because the herring did not involuntarily
shoot down to the sea floor because of the weight of
the water overhead. Water does have weight, however, which a sufficiently skeptical dolphin physicist
might be able to prove with a simple experiment.
One could weigh a 1-liter metal box full of water and
then replace the water with air and weigh it again.
The difference in weight would be the difference in
weight between 1 liter of water of and 1 liter of air.
Since air is much less dense than water, this would
approximately equal the weight of 1 liter of water.
Observations
A Density of air
You can remove the air from the flask by attaching the vacuum pump to the vacuum flask with the
rubber and glass tubing, then turning on the pump.
You can use the scale to determine how much mass
was lost when the air was evacuated.
Make any other observations you need in order to
find out the density of air and to estimate error bars
for your result.
B Is volume and/or mass conserved when two
fluids are mixed?
The idea here is to find out whether volume and/or
mass is conserved when water and alcohol are mixed.
The obvious way to attempt this would be to measure the volume and mass of a sample of water, the
volume and mass of a sample of alcohol, and their
volume and mass when mixed. There are two problems with the obvious method: (1) when you pour
one of the liquids into the other, droplets of liquid
will be left inside the original vessel; and (2) the
27
most accurate way to measure the volume of a liquid is with a volumetric flask, which only allows one
specific, calibrated volume to be measured.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Give an example of two things having the same
mass and different densities.
P2 Give an example of two things having the same
density and different masses.
Heres a way to get around those problems. Put the
magnetic stirrer inside the flask. Pour water through
a funnel into a volumetric flask, filling it less than
half-way. (Do not use the pipette to transfer the
water.) A common mistake is to fill the flask more
than half-way. Now pour a thin layer of cooking
oil on top. Cooking oil does not mix with water,
so it forms a layer on top of the water. (Set aside
one funnel that you will use only for the oil, since
the oil tends to form a film on the sides.) Finally,
gently pour the alcohol on top. Alcohol does not mix
with cooking oil either, so it forms a third layer. By
making the alcohol come exactly up to the mark on
the calibrated flask, you can make the total volume
very accurately equal to 100 mL. In practice, it is
hard to avoid putting in too much alcohol through
the funnel, so if necessary you can take some back
out with the pipette.
If you put the whole thing on the balance now, you
know both the volume (100 mL) and the mass of
the whole thing when the alcohol and water have
been kept separate. Now, mix everything up with
the magnetic stirrer. The water and alcohol form a
mixture. You can now test whether the volume or
mass has changed.
If the mixture does not turn out to have a volume
that looks like exactly 100 mL, you can use the following tricks to measure accurately the excess or
deficit with respect to 100 mL. If it is less than 100
28
Lab 10
Conservation Laws
Self-Check
Do a quick analysis of both parts without error analysis. Plan how you will do your error analysis.
Analysis
A. If your results show that air has weight, determine
the (nonzero) density of air, with an estimate of your
random errors.
B. Decide whether volume and/or mass is conserved
when alcohol and water are mixed, taking into account your estimates of random errors.
29
11
Conservation of Energy
Apparatus
air track
cart
springs (steel, 1.5 cm diameter)
photogate (PASCO)
computer
stopwatches
air blowers
alligator clips
spring scales
vernier calipers
power strips for CENCO blowers
string
Goal
Test conservation of energy for an object oscillating
around an equilibrium position.
Introduction
One of the most impressive aspects of the physical
world is the apparent permanence of so many of its
parts. Objects such as the sun or rocks on earth
have remained unchanged for billions of years, so it
might seem that they are in perfect equilibrium, with
zero net force on each part of the whole. In reality,
the atoms in a rock do not sit perfectly still at an
equilibrium point they are constantly in vibration
about their equilibrium positions. The unchanging
oblate shape of the sun is also an illusion. The sun
is continually vibrating like a bell or a jiggling water
balloon, as shown in the (exaggerated) figure. The
nuclei of atoms also jiggle spontaneously like little
water balloons. The fact that these types of motion
continue indefinitely without dying out or building
30
Lab 11
Conservation of Energy
Our model of this type of oscillation about equilibrium will be the motion of a cart on an air track between two springs. The sum of the forces exerted by
the two springs should at least approximately obey
Hookes law,
F = kx
,
where the equilibrium point is at x = 0. The negative sign means that if the object is displaced in the
positive direction, the force tends to bring it back
in the negative direction, towards equilibrium, and
vice versa. Of course, there are no actual springs
involved in the sun or between a rocks atoms, but
we can still learn about this type of situation in a
lab experiment with a mass attached to a spring. In
this lab, you will study how the changing velocity of
the object, in this case a cart on an air track, can
be understood using conservation of energy. Recall
that for a constant force, the potential energy is simply F x, but for a force that is different at different
locations, the potential energy is minus the area under the curve on a graph of F vs. x. In the present
case, the area formed is a triangle with base = x,
height = kx, and
1
base height
2
1
= kx2
2
area =
1 2
kx
2
Preliminary Observations
You should do both of the following methods of determining the spring constant.
Determining the spring constant: method 1
Pull the cart to the side with a spring scale, and
make a graph of F versus x, like the one above.
To avoid pulling at the wrong angle, it helps if you
connect the spring scale to the cart with a piece of
string. Find the combined spring constant of the two
springs, k, from the slope of the graph. (Dont disconnect either spring.) Since youll only use method
1 as a rough check against the more precise method
2, dont spend time taking a lot of data points.
Determining the spring constant: method 2
The second technique for determining k is to pull the
cart to one side, release it, and measure the period
of its side-to-side motion, i.e., the time required for
each complete repetition of its vibration. As well
discuss later in the course, the period is nearly independent of the amount of travel, and the spring
constant is related to the period and the mass of the
cart by the equation k = m(2/T )2 . A small period indicates a large spring constant, since a powerful spring would be required to whip the cart back
and forth rapidly. The period, T , can be found very
accurately by using a stopwatch to time many oscillations in a row without stopping. This method
therefore gives a very accurate value for k, which
you should use in your analysis of the conservation
of energy. Your k value from method 1 is still useful
as a check, however.
Observations
The technique is essentially the same as in lab 9,
which you may want to review. Instructions for use
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 What measurements besides those mentioned
above will you need to do in lab in order to check
conservation of energy?
31
Self-Check
Calculate the energies at the extremes, where P E =
0 and KE = 0, and see whether the energy is staying
roughly constant. You should do this self-check as
early as possible in the lab, so that you can make
sure youre not spending lots of time collecting data
that turn out to be bogus.
Analysis
Graph P E, KE, and the total energy as functions
of x, with error bars (see appendices 1, 2, and 3),
all overlaid on the same plot. Make sure to include
the points with KE = 0 and P E = 0. As a shortcut
in your error analysis, its okay if you do the error
analysis for your most typical data-point, in which
the energy is split roughly 50-50 between PE and
KE, and then assume that the same error bars on
P E, KE, and total energy apply to all the other
points on the graph as well.
Discuss whether you think conservation of energy
has been verified.
32
Lab 11
Conservation of Energy
33
12
Conservation of Momentum
Apparatus
computer with Logger Pro software
track
2 dynamics carts and 2 carts with magnets
1-kg weight
1 kg slotted weight
masking tape
2 force sensors with rubber corks
Qualitative Observations
First youre going to observe some collisions between
two carts and see how conservation of momentum
plays out. If you really wanted to take numerical
data, it would be a hassle, because momentum depends on mass and velocity, and there would be four
different velocity numbers youd have to measure:
cart 1 before the collision, cart 1 after the collision,
cart 2 before, and cart 2 after. To avoid all this complication, the first part of the lab will use only visual
observations.
Try gently pressing the two carts together on the
track. As they come close to each other, youll feel
them repelling each other! Thats because they have
magnets built into the ends. The magnets act like
perfect springs. For instance, if you hold one cart
firmly in place and let the other one roll at it, the
incoming cart will bounce back at almost exactly the
same speed. Its like a perfect superball.
A Equal masses, target at rest, elastic collision
Roll one cart toward the other. The target cart is
initially at rest. Conservation of momentum reads
like this,
M
=? M
+M
+M
where the two blanks on the left stand for the two
carts velocities before the collision, and the two
blanks on the right are for their velocities after the
collision. All conservation laws work like this: the
total amount of something remains the same. You
dont have any real numbers, but just from eyeballing the collision, what seems to have happened?
Lets just arbitrarily say that the mass of a cart is
one unit, so that wherever it says M x in the equation, youre just multiplying by one. You also dont
34
Lab 12
Conservation of Momentum
have any numerical values for the velocities, but suppose we say that the initial velocity of the incoming
cart is one unit. Does it look like conservation of
momentum was satisfied?
B Mirror symmetry
Now reenact the collision from part A, but do everything as a mirror image. The roles of the target cart
and incoming cart are reversed, and the direction of
motion is also reversed.
M
=? M
+M
+M
+M
+M
+M
+M
E Sticking
Arrange a collision in which the carts will stick together rather than rebounding. You can do this by
letting the velcro ends hit each other instead of the
magnet ends. Make a collision in which the target is
initially stationary.
M
=? M
+M
+M
+M
+M
Quantitative Observations
Now were going to explore the reasons why momentum always seems to be conserved. Parts H and I
will be demonstrated by the instructor for the whole
class at once.
Attach the force sensors to the carts, and put on the
rubber stoppers. Make sure that the rubber stoppers
are positioned sufficiently far out from the body of
the cart so that they will not rub against the edge
of the cart. Put the switch on the sensor in the
+10 N position. Plug the sensors into the DIN1
and DIN2 ports on the interface box. Start up the
Logger Pro software, and do File>Open>Probes and
Sensors>Force Sensors>Dual Range Forrce>2-10 N
Dual Range. Tell the computer to zero the sensors.
Try collecting data and pushing and pulling on the
rubber stopper. You should get a graph showing how
the force went up and down over time. The sensor
uses negative numbers (bottom half of the graph) for
forces that squish the sensor, and positive numbers
(top half) for forces that stretch it. Try both sensors,
and make sure you understand what the red and blue
traces on the graph are showing you.
H. Put the extra 1-kilogram weight on one of the
carts. Put it on the track by itself, without the other
cart. Try accelerating it from rest with a gentle,
35
13
Torque
Apparatus
meter stick with holes drilled in it . . . . . . . . 1/group
spring scales, calibrated in newtons
weights
string
protractors
hooks
Goal
Test whether the total force and torque on an object
at rest both equal zero.
Introduction
It is not enough for a boat not to sink. It also must
not capsize. This is an example of a general fact
about physics, which is also well known to people
who overindulge in alcohol: if an object is to be in
a stable equilibrium at rest, it must not only have
zero net force on it, to keep from picking up momentum, but also zero net torque, to keep from acquiring
angular momentum.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
Observations
Weigh your meter stick before you do anything else;
they dont all weigh the same amount.
For each spring scale, hang a known weight from it,
and adjust the calibration tab so that the scale gives
the correct result.
36
Lab 13
Torque
P2 All the torques will be tending to cause rotation in the same plane. You can therefore use plus
and minus signs to represent clockwise and counterclockwise torques. Choose which one youll call positive. Using your choice of axis, which of the four
torques, H , M , L , and R , will be negative, which
will be positive, and which will be zero?
P3 Suppose that in the figure above, the angle between the meter stick and the hanging weight is 80 ,
the mass of the hanging weight is 1 kg, and the mass
of the meter stick is 0.1 kg. If a student is then trying to calculate the x components of the forces FM
and FH , why is it incorrect to say
FM ,x = (0.1 kg)(9.8 m/s2 )
and
FH,x = (1 kg)(9.8 m/s2 )(cos 80 )?
Analysis
Determine the total force and total torque on the
meter stick. For the forces, I think a graphical calculation will be easier than a numerical one.
Finally, repeat your calculation of the total torque
using a different point as your axis. Although youre
normally expected to do your analysis completely independently, for this lab its okay if you find the total
torque for one choice of axis, and your lab partners
do the calculation their own choices.
Error analysis is not required. For extra credit, you
can do error analysis for one of your total torques.
37
14
Absolute Zero
Apparatus
gas capillary tube
large test tube
mercury thermometer
glass syringe
electric heating pad
oven mitts
latex tubing
ice
string
funnels
clamps
gripper clamps
Introduction
If heat is a form of random molecular motion, then
it makes sense that there is some minimum temperature at which the molecules arent moving at all.
With fancy equipment, physicists have gotten samples of matter to within a fraction of a degree above
absolute zero, but they have never actually reached
absolute zero (and the laws of thermodynamics actually imply that they never can). Nevertheless, we
can determine how cold absolute zero is without even
getting very close to it. Kinetic theory tells us that
the volume of an ideal gas is proportional to how
high it is above absolute zero. In this lab, youll
measure the volume of a sample of air at temperatures between 0 and 100 degrees C, and determine
where absolute zero lies by extrapolating to the temperature at which it would have had zero volume.
Observations
Tie a short piece of string to the thermometer so
that youll be able to pull it back out of the beaker
when you want to without dipping your hands in
hot water. Start heating the water up to the boiling
38
Lab 14
Absolute Zero
Analysis
Graph the temperature and volume against each other.
Does the graph appear to be linear? If so, extrapolate to find the temperature at which the volume
would be zero.
If your data are nice and linear, then your main
source of error will be random errors, and you should
then determine error bars for your value of absolute
zero using the techniques discussed in Appendix 4.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Should you measure the volume from the top,
the middle, or the bottom of the mercury? Explain.
39
15
Apparatus
large flask
glass syringe
water manometer
helium (medium size cylinder, $40 from Party City)
difluoroethane (sold in cans as gas duster at Frys)
stopwatch
hose clamps
grabber clamps
stands
Introduction
Although the theory that matter was made of atoms
started to be talked about seriously by scientists as
early as Galileos time, scientists generally didnt
think of it as something that was literally true. They
considered the atomic theory to be a useful model,
but they thought that any fundamental explanation
of real-world phenomena should avoid talking about
hypothetical things like atoms. This feeling was so
strong that the physicist Ludwig Boltzmann, who
came up with an atomic explanation of entropy, was
driven to suicide by the harsh criticism to which his
ideas were subjected. Even more suspect than the
existence of atoms was any attempt to discuss things
like the shapes of molecules that could be formed
by putting them together like tinkertoys; such ideas
seemed much too far removed from the possibility of
any experimental testing.
Surprisingly, then, a simple experiment, due to Clement and Desormes, is capable of distinguishing two
samples of gas that differ only by the shape of their
molecules, even if the gases have the same density
and are composed of molecules having the same mass.
Use the glass syringe to apply a slight overpressure
to the air inside the flask, causing the difference in
height between the water in the two sides of the
manometer to be about 30 cm. Wait one minute
to make sure the air is in thermal equilibrium with
the room, and then take a pressure reading, p1 . Release the pressure by popping the cork for precisely
one second, timed on a stopwatch. The air cools
slightly due to its expansion, because it does mechanical work as it exits throught the valve. However, because the expansion is rapid, and heat con-
40
Lab 15
duction is a slow process, we can treat this as insulated expansion, as discussed in Appendix 2 of Simple Nature. If the gas is a monoatomic one, such
as helium, then the amount of cooling of the gas, as
proved in the book, is given by the relation T P b ,
where b = 2/5. If the gas is not monoatomic, however, then its molecules can rotate,1 and at any given
time some of its energy is in the form of kinetic energy along the x, y, and z axes, but some is in the
form of rotational kinetic energy. Extracting a given
amount of energy from a diatomic or polyatomic gas,
therefore, doesnt cool it as much as it would cool a
monoatomic gas, and it turns out that b = 2/7 for a
diatomic gas, and 1/4 for a polyatomic gas.2
Wait one minute for the air to warm back up to room
temperature. The pressure comes back up somewhat
as the air warms back up, and although you should
wait a full minute to make sure its back in thermal
equilibrium, most of the rewarming occurs during
the first few seconds after you finish venting the initial pressure. The pressure will recover to a value
p2 which is less than p1 . The ratio p2 /p1 gives the
value of b for the gas.3
Im still working on improving this lab. The basic idea I have in mind is to have you do the lab
once with helium (monoatomic), air (diatomic), and
1 An individual atom in a monoatomic gas has essentially
all its mass concentrated in the nucleus exactly at its center,
so it takes an effectively infinite amount of energy to make it
rotate with a certain amount of angular momentum.
2 Youll often see this stated in terms of the variable =
1/(1 b), which takes on the values 5/3, 7/5, and 4/3.
3 In terms of the variable , we have = p /(p p ).
1
1
2
difluoroethane (polyatomic), and observe the differences in the results due to the different shapes of
the molecules. There are various systematic errors
in the experiment, so my own absolute results for
the b of air havent been of extremely high precision; however, in a comparative experiment, I think
it will be easy to see a difference in b between the
gases. One possible problem with the air is that it
contains water vapor, which messes up the thermodynamic properties of the air, because water droplets
can condense out of the air when the pressure is
dropped suddenly, as when you open a can of beer.
The helium and difluoroethane shouldnt have this
problem. In the spring semester of 2008, we tried
all three gases, and found that it was fairly easy to
detect a clear systematic difference between a higher
b for air (.20, .29, .33, .29, and .31 for the five lab
groups) and a lower one for difluoroethane (.18, .20,
.33, .25, and .24), but the results for helium were
much lower than theory, and barely distinguishable
from air (.29, .35, .35, .31, and .31, versus .40 according to theory). This may be because were not
actually getting the flasks as full of pure helium as
we think we are.
Some of the flasks have holes at both the top and the
bottom. With these flasks, its a good idea to introduce the helium through the bottom hole, since its
lighter than air, and will rise. The difluoroethane,
on the other hand, should be put in through the top
hole, because its heavier than air. I dont know if
it will be practical to use the helium with the flasks
that only have holes at the top.
Both the helium and the difluoroethane can displace
the beathable air in the classroom, and the amount
of helium in the large canister is particularly big. For
this reason, Ive been dispensing the helium outside
the classroom.
The difluoroethane is a liquid when its pressurized
inside the can. When you vent some of the pressure
through the nozzle, the pressure drops, and some of
it vaporizes and comes out. The vaporization consumes energy, so the can becomes cold. If you hold
the can upside down and spray it, liquid is emitted
rather than gas; this liquid is extremely cold, and
can cause frostbite if it gets on your skin. The gas is
not flammable, and does not harm the ozone layer.
Some teenagers have intentionally inhaled it to get
high, so the manufacturers have added a bitterant.
41
16
The Pendulum
Apparatus
string
cylindrical pendulum bobs
hooked masses
protractor
stopwatch
computer with photogate and Vernier Timer software
clamps (not hooks) for holding the string
tape measures
meter sticks
When a moving thing, such as a wave, an orbiting planet, a wheel, or a pendulum, goes through
a repetitive cycle of motion, the time required for
one complete cycle is called the period, T . Note
that a pendulum visits any given point once while
traveling in one direction and once while traveling
in the opposite direction. The period is defined as
how long it takes to come back to the same point,
traveling in the same direction.
Goal
Find out how the period of a pendulum depends on
its length and mass, and on the amplitude of its
swing.
Introduction
Observations
Make observations to determine how the period, T ,
depends on A, L, and m. You will want to use the
42
Lab 16
The Pendulum
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
Self-Check
Figure out which variable T depends on most strongly,
and extract p (see below).
Analysis
Graph your data and state your conclusions about
whether T depends on A, L and m. Remember
that on a graph of experimental data, the horizontal
axis should always be the quantity you controlled directly, and the vertical axis should be the quantity
you measured but did not directly select. The photogate is so accurate that there is not much point
in putting error bars on your graph they would
be too small to see. Remember, however, that there
are some fairly significant systematic errors, e.g., it is
hard to accurately keep L the same when switching
masses.
It may happen that when you change one of the variables, there are only small, insignificant changes in
the period, but depending on how you graph the
data, it may look like these are real changes in the
period. Most computer graphing software has a default which is to make the y axis stretch only across
the range of actual y data. e.g., if your periods
were all between 0.567 and 0.574 s, then the software makes an extremely magnified graph, with the
y axis running only over the short range from 0.567
to 0.574 s. On such a scale, it may seem at first
glance that there are some major changes in the period. To help yourself interpret your graphs, you
should make them all with the same y scale, going
from zero all the way up to the highest period you
ever measured. Then youll be comparing all three
graphs on the same footing.
Of the three variables, find the one on which the
period depends the most strongly, and use the tech-
43
44
Lab 16
The Pendulum
45
17
Resonance
Apparatus
vibrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
stopwatch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
multimeter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
banana plug cables
Thornton power supplies (in lab benches in 416)
Leybold 521 545 17-volt DC power supplies1
24 V AC power supplies
Goals
Observe the phenomenon of resonance.
Introduction
To break a wine glass, an opera singer has to sing
the right note. To hear a radio signal, you have to
be tuned to the right frequency. These are examples
of the phenomenon of resonance: a vibrating system
will respond most strongly to a force that varies with
a particular frequency.
Observations
Simplified mechanical drawing of the vibrator, front view.
Apparatus
In this lab you will investigate the phenomenon of
resonance using the apparatus shown in the figure.
1 or HP6204B 40-volt supplies, if the Leybold supplies
arent bought because of budget issues
46
Lab 17
Resonance
B Damping
Note the coils of wire at the bottom of the disk.
These are electromagnets. Their purpose is not to
attract the disk magnetically (in fact the disk is
made of a nonmagnetic metal) but rather to increase
the amount of damping in the system. Whenever a
metal is moved through a magnetic field, the electrons in the metal are made to swirl around. As
they eddy like this, they undergo random collisions
with atoms, causing the atoms to vibrate. Vibration
of atoms is heat, so where did this heat energy come
from ultimately? In our system, the only source of
energy is the energy of the vibrating disk. The net
effect is thus to suck energy out of the vibration and
convert it into heat. Although this magnetic and
electrical effect is entirely different from mechanical
friction, the result is the same. Creating damping in
this manner has the advantage that it can be made
stronger or weaker simply by increasing or decreasing the strength of the magnetic field.
Turn off all the electrical equipment and leave it unplugged. Connect the circuit shown in the top left
of the electrical diagram, consisting of a power supply to run the electromagnet plus a meter . You do
not yet need the power supply for driving the motor.
The meter will tell you how much electrical current
is flowing through the electromagnet, which will give
you a numerical measure of how strong your damping is. It reads out in units of amperes (A), the
metric unit of electrical current. Although this does
not directly tell you the amount of damping force in
units of newtons (the force depends on velocity), the
force is proportional to the current.
Once you have everything hooked up, check with
your instructor before plugging things in and turning them on. If you do the setup wrong, you could
blow a fuse, which is no big deal, but a more serious goof would be to put too much current through
the electromagnet, which could burn it up, permanently ruining it. Once your instructor has checked
this part of the electrical setup she/he will show you
how to monitor the current on the meter to make
sure that you never have too much.
The Q of an oscillator is defined as the number of
oscillations required for damping to reduce the energy of the vibrations by a factor of 535 (a definition originating from the quantity e2 ). As planned
in your prelab, measure the Q of the system with
the electromagnet turned off, then with a low current through the electromagnet, and then a higher
current. There are differences among the oscillators,
possibly because they were dropped on the floor dur-
47
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
48
Lab 17
Resonance
Self-Check
Make your graphs for part F (see below), and see if
they make sense. Make sure to make the frequency
axis expanded enough to get an accurate FWHM
from the graph,
Analysis
Compare your observations in parts C, D, and E
with theory.
For part F, construct graphs with the square of the
amplitude on the y axis and the frequency on the
x axis. The reason for using the square of the amplitude is that the standard way of specifying the
width of a resonance peak is to give its full width at
half resonance (FWHM), which is measured between
the two points where the energy of the steady-state
vibration equals half its maximum value. Energy is
proportional to the square of the amplitude. Determine the FWHM of the resonance for each value of
the damping current, and find whether the expected
relationship exists between Q and FWHM; make a
numerical test, not just a qualitative one. Obviously
there is no way you can get an accurate FWHM if
the peak is only as wide as a pencil on the graph
make an appropriate choice of the range of frequencies on the x axis.
49
18
This is a simplified version of lab 17, meant to introduce some concepts related to mechanical resonance, without any detailed data-taking. The idea
is to reinforce the relevant concepts from physics 221
so that they can be used as a metaphor for electrical
resonances in 222.
Apparatus
vibrator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Thornton power supply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
stopwatch . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
multimeter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
banana plug cables
Goals
Observe the phenomenon of resonance.
Learn how to visualize phases and amplitudes
in a plane.
Introduction
To break a wine glass, an opera singer has to sing
the right note. To hear a radio signal, you have to
be tuned to the right frequency. These are examples
of the phenomenon of resonance: a vibrating system
will respond most strongly to a force that varies with
a particular frequency.
Apparatus
In this lab you will investigate the phenomenon of
resonance using the apparatus shown in the figure.
If the motor is stopped so that the arms are locked in
place, the metal disk can still swing clockwise and
counterclockwise because it is attached to the upright rod with a flexible spiral spring. A push on the
disk will result in vibrations that persist for quite
a while before the internal friction in the spring reduces their amplitude to an imperceptible level. This
would be an example of a free vibration, in which
energy is steadily lost in the form of heat, but no
external force pumps in energy to replace it.
50
Lab 18
Observations
A Period of Free Vibrations
Start without any of the electrical stuff hooked up.
Twist the disk to one side, release it, and use the
stopwatch to determine its natural period of vibra-
B Damping
Now connect the labs DC power supply to the terminals on the motor labeled motorpanschlu. The
coarse and fine adjustments to the speed of the motor are marked gro (gross) and fein (fine).
Turn off all the electrical equipment and leave it unplugged. Connect the circuit shown in the top left
of the electrical diagram, consisting of a power supply to run the electromagnet plus a meter . You do
not yet need the power supply for driving the motor.
The meter will tell you how much electrical current
is flowing through the electromagnet, which will give
you a numerical measure of how strong your damping is. It reads out in units of amperes (A), the
metric unit of electrical current. Although this does
not directly tell you the amount of damping force in
units of newtons (the force depends on velocity), the
force is proportional to the current.
Once you have everything hooked up, check with
your instructor before plugging things in and turning them on. If you do the setup wrong, you could
blow a fuse, which is no big deal, but a more serious goof would be to put too much current through
the electromagnet, which could burn it up, permanently ruining it. Once your instructor has checked
this part of the electrical setup she/he will show you
how to monitor the current on the meter to make
sure that you never have too much.
The Q of an oscillator is defined as the number of
oscillations required for damping to reduce the energy of the vibrations by a factor of 535 (a definition
originating from the quantity e2 ). As planned in
your prelab, measure the Q of the system with the
electromagnet turned off, then with a current of 0.25
51
-180 would represent the same thing: the oscillations have phases that are exactly the opposite. Try
to estimate roughly what the phase angle is. You
dont have any way to measure it accurately, but you
should be able to estimate it to the nearest multiple
of 45 . Measure the amplitude of the steady-state
response as well.
tude.]
Now measure the phase and amplitude of the response when the driving force is at the resonant frequency.
Finally, do the same measurements when the driving
force is significantly above resonance.
Analysis
The point of this is to connect the mechanical analog
to what you know about the phase response of a
resonant LRC circuit. Youre measuring the phase
between F and x, which is analogous to the phase
between V and q in electrical terms. However, most
people think of AC circuits in terms of V and I, not
V and q. The phase relationships youre expecting,
therefore, are those that would hold between F and
v = dx/dt, which differ by 90 degrees from the F x
phases you actually measured as raw data.
To complete the electrical analogy, we would really
prefer to discuss the mechanical analog of impedance.
The (constant) driving force from the motor plays
the role of the voltage, while the frequency-dependent
amplitude of the vibration plays the role of the current. Dividing these two quantities gives us something analogous to impedance, and since the driving
force is always the same, we can say that the inverse of the amplitude is essentially a measure of
the impedance.
To summarize, you have a complex impedance whose
amplitude and phase angle you can determine from
your data. Plot the impedances at the various frequencies in the complex plane.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Plan how you will determine the Q of your oscillator in part B. [Hint: Note that the energy of a
vibration is proportional to the square of the ampli-
52
Lab 18
53
19
Standing Waves
Apparatus
string
weights, including 1-gram weights
pulley
vibrator
paperclips
metersticks
butcher paper
scissors
weight holders
Goals
Observe the resonant modes of vibration of a
string.
Setup
The apparatus allows you to excite vibrations at a
fixed frequency of 120 Hz (twice the frequency of
the alternating current that runs the vibrator). The
tension in the string can be controlled by varying the
weight.
You may find it helpful to put a strip of white butcher
paper behind the black string for better visual contrast.
Its important to get the vibrator set up properly
along the same line as the string, not at an angle.
Find how the speed of waves on a string depends on the tension in the string.
Introduction
The Greek philosopher Pythagoras is said to have
been the first to observe that two plucked strings
sounded good together when their lengths were in
the proportion of two small integers. (This is assuming the strings are of the same material and under
the same tension.) For instance, he thought a pleasant combination of notes was produced when one
string was twice the length of the other, but that the
combination was unpleasant when the ratio was, say,
1.4 to 1 (like the notes B and F). Although different
combinations of notes are used in different cultures
and different styles of music, there is at least some
scientific justification for Pythagoras statement. We
now know that a plucked string does not just vibrate
at a single frequency but simultaneously at a whole
series of frequencies f1 , 2f1 , 3f1 ,... These frequencies are called the harmonics. If one string is twice
the length of the other, then its lowest harmonic is at
half the frequency of the other strings, and its harmonics coincide with the odd-numbered harmonics
of the other string. If the ratio is 1.4 to 1, however,
then there is essentially no regular relationship between the two sets of frequencies, and many of the
harmonics lie close enough in frequency to produce
unpleasant beats.
54
Lab 19
Standing Waves
Observations
Observe as many modes of vibration as you can. You
will probably not be able to observe the fundamental (one hump) because it would require too much
weight. In each case, you will want to fine-tune the
weight to get as close as possible to the middle of
the resonance, where the amplitude of vibration is
at a maximum. When youre close to the peak of
a resonance, an easy way to tell whether to add or
remove weight is by gently pressing down or lifting
up on the weights with your finger to see whether
the amplitude increases or decreases.
For large values of N , you may find that you need to
use a paperclip instead of the weight holder, in order
to make the mass sufficiently small. Keep in mind,
however, that you wont really improve the quality
of your data very much by taking data for very high
values of N , since the 1-gram precision with which
you can locate these resonances results in a poor
relative precision compared to a small weight.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
Self-Check
Do your analysis in lab.
Analysis
Use the techniques given in appendix 5 to see if you
can find a power-law relationship between the veloc-
55
20
Resonances of Sound
Apparatus
wave generator (PASCO PI-9587C) . . . . . . . 1/group
speaker (Thornton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
100 mL graduated cylinder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Linux computers with FFT Explorer installed (Lassie,
Fang, and Buck in 416T)
flexible whistling tube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
tuning fork marked with frequency, mounted on a
wooden box . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
aluminum rod, 3/4-inch dia, about 1 m long
2
Goals
Find the resonant frequencies of the air inside
a cylinder by two methods.
Measure the speeds of sound in air and in aluminum.
Introduction
In the womb, your first sensory experiences were of
your mothers voice, and soon after birth you learned
to distinguish the particular sounds of your parents
voices from those of strangers. The human ear-brain
system is amazingly sophisticated in its ability to
classify vowels and consonants, recognize peoples
voices, and analyze musical sound. Until the 19thcentury investigations of Helmholtz, the whole process was completely mysterious. How could we so
easily tell a cello from a violin playing the same note?
A radio station in Chicago has a weekly contest in
which jazz fanatics are asked to identify instrumentalists simply by their distinctly individual timbres
how is this possible?
Helmholtz found (using incredibly primitive nonelectronic equipment) that part of the answer lay in the
relative strengths of the overtones. The psychological sensation of pitch is related to frequency, e.g., 440
Hz is the note A. But a saxophonist playing the
note A is actually producing a rich spectrum of
frequencies, including 440 Hz, 880 Hz, 1320 Hz, and
many other multiples of the lowest frequency, known
as the fundamental. The ear-brain system perceives
all these overtones as a single sound because they are
all multiples of the fundamental frequency. (The Javanese orchestra called the gamelan sounds strange
56
Lab 20
Resonances of Sound
Setup
Unplug the wave generator. Check the fuse in the
back of the wave generator to make sure it is not
blown, then put it back in. Plug in the wave generator and turn off the on/off switch at the top right.
Turn the amplitude knob of the wave generator to
zero, and then turn on the on/off switch.
Plug the speaker into the wave generator. The banana plugs go in the two holes on the right. Set the
frequency to something audible. Wait 30 seconds
for the wave generator to warm up, then turn the
amplitude knob up until you hear a sound.
The wave generator and the speaker are not really
designed to work together, so if you leave the volume
up very high for a long time, it is possible to blow
the speaker or damage the wave generator. Also, the
sine waves are annoying when played continuously at
loud volumes!
Preliminary Observations
Observations
This lab has three parts, A, B, and C. It is not really
possible for more than one group to do part A in the
same room, both because their sounds interfere with
one another and because the noise becomes annoying for everyone. Your instructor will probably have
three groups working on part A at one time, one
group in the main room, one in the small side room,
and one in the physics stockroom. Meanwhile, the
other groups will be doing parts B and C.
A Direct Measurement of Resonances by Listening
Set up the graduated cylinder so its mouth is covering the center of the speaker. Find as many frequencies as possible at which the cylinder resonates.
When you sweep through those frequencies, the sound
becomes louder. To make sure youre really hearing
a resonance of the cylinder, make sure to repeat each
observation with the cylinder removed, and make
sure the resonance goes away. For each resonance,
take several measurements of its frequency if you
are careful, you can pin it down to within 10 Hz
or so. You can probably speed up your search significantly by calculating approximately where you
expect the resonances to be, then looking for them.
57
58
Lab 20
Resonances of Sound
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Find an equation to predict the frequencies of
the resonances in parts A and B. Note that they
will not be the same equations, since one tube is
symmetric and the other is asymmetric.
Self-Check
Extract the speed of sound from either part A or
part B, without error analysis, and make sure you
get something close to the accepted value.
Analysis
Make a graph of wavelength versus period for the
resonances of the graduated cylinder, check whether
it looks like it theoretically should, and if so, find
the speed of sound from its slope, with error bars,
as discussed in appendix 4.
Use the data from part B to find a second value of
the speed of sound, also with error bars.
The effective length of the cylinder in part A should
be increased by 0.4 times its diameter to account for
the small amount of air beyond the end that also vibrates. For part B, where the whistling tube is open
at both ends, you should add 0.8 times its diameter.
When estimating error bars from part B, you may
be tempted to say that it must be perfectly accurate,
since its being done by a computer. Not so! You will
see that the peak is a little ragged, and that means
you cannot find the frequency with perfect accuracy.
Extract the speed of sound in aluminum from your
data in part C, including error bars.
59
21
Static Electricity
Apparatus
scotch tape
rubber rod
heat lamp
fur
bits of paper
rods and strips of various materials
30-50 cm rods, and angle brackets, for hanging charged
rods
Goal
Determine the qualitative rules governing electrical
charge and forces.
Newtons law of gravity gave a mathematical formula for the gravitational force, but his theory also
made several important non-mathematical statements
about gravity:
Every mass in the universe attracts every other
mass in the universe.
Gravity works the same for earthly objects as
for heavenly bodies.
The force acts at a distance, without any need
for physical contact.
Mass is always positive, and gravity is always
attractive, not repulsive.
The last statement is interesting, especially because
it would be fun and useful to have access to some
negative mass, which would fall up instead of down
(like the upsydaisium of Rocky and Bullwinkle
fame).
Although it has never been found, there is no theoretical reason why a second, negative type of mass
cant exist. Indeed, it is believed that the nuclear
force, which holds quarks together to form protons
and neutrons, involves three qualities analogous to
mass. These are facetiously referred to as red,
green, and blue, although they have nothing to
do with the actual colors. The force between two of
Lab 21
Observations
Introduction
60
Static Electricity
Self-Check
The following are examples of incorrect reasoning
about this lab. As a self-check, it would be a very
good idea to figure out for yourself in each case why
the reasoning is logically incorrect or inconsistent
with Newtons laws. You do not need to do this in
writing it is just to help you understand whats
going on. If you cant figure some of them out, ask
your instructor before leaving lab.
(1) The first piece of tape exerted a force on the
second, but the second didnt exert one on the first.
(2) The first piece of tape repelled the second, and
the second attracted the first.
(3) We observed three types of charge: two that
exert forces, and a third, neutral type.
(4) The piece of tape that came from the top was
positive, and the piece from the bottom was negative.
(5) One piece of tape had electrons on it, and the
other had protons on it.
(6) We know there were two types of charge, not
three, because we observed two types of interactions,
attraction and repulsion.
Writeup
Explain what you have concluded about electrical
charge and forces. Base your conclusions on your
data!
61
for
62
Lab 21
Static Electricity
63
22
The Oscilloscope
Apparatus
oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
microphone (RS 33-1067) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
microphone (Shure C606) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1
PI-9587C sine wave generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
amplifier . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
various tuning forks
If theres an equipment conflict with respect to the
sine wave generators, the HP200CD sine wave generators can be used instead.
Goals
Learn to use an oscilloscope.
Observe sound waves on an oscilloscope.
Introduction
One of the main differences you will notice between
your second semester of physics and the first is that
many of the phenomena you will learn about are
not directly accessible to your senses. For example,
electric fields, the flow of electrons in wires, and the
inner workings of the atom are all invisible. The
oscilloscope is a versatile laboratory instrument that
can indirectly help you to see whats going on.
The Oscilloscope
An oscilloscope graphs an electrical signal that varies
as a function of time. The graph is drawn from left to
right across the screen, being painted in real time as
the input signal varies. In this lab, you will be using
the signal from a microphone as an input, allowing
you to see sound waves.
The input signal is supplied in the form of a voltage.
You are already familiar with the term voltage
from common speech, but you may not have learned
the formal definition yet in the lecture course. Voltage, measured in metric units of volts (V), is defined
as the electrical potential energy per unit charge.
For instance if 2 nC of charge flows from one terminal of a 9-volt battery to the other terminal, the
potential energy consumed equals 18 nJ. To use a
mechanical analogy, when you blow air out between
64
Lab 22
The Oscilloscope
Setup
To start with, well use a sine wave generator, which
makes a voltage that varies sinusoidally with time.
This gives you a convenient signal to work with while
you get the scope working. Use the black and white
outputs on the PI-9587C.
65
50automatically sets the trigger level to midway between the top and bottom peaks of the
signal.
You want to select AC, not DC or GND, on
the channel youre using. You are looking at
a voltage that is alternating, creating an alternating current, AC. The DC setting is
only necessary when dealing with constant or
very slowly varying voltages. The GND simply draws a graph using y = 0, which is only
useful in certain situations, such as when you
cant find the trace. To select AC, press the
CH 1 MENU button, and select AC coupling.
Observe the effect of changing the voltage scale and
time base on the scope. Try changing the frequency
and amplitude on the sine wave generator.
You can freeze the display by pressing RUN/STOP,
and then unfreeze it by pressing the button again.
Preliminary Observations
Now try observing signals from the microphone. By
feeding the mics signal through the amplifier and
then to the scope, you can make the signals easier
to see.
As of fall 2008, were in the process of testing a better mic (Shure brand) to replace the Radio Shack
ones. We have one of the Shure ones. If your group
is the one that gets it, please relay the information
about how it worked through your instructor and
back to Ben Crowell. Some notes about this mic: As
with the Radio Shack mics, polarity matters. The
tip of the phono plug connector is the live connection, and the part farther back from the tip is the
grounded part. You can connect on to the phono
plug with alligator clips. You dont need the amplifier. Notes for instructors: This mic was $30 at
Frys. It has an unusually high gain, -52 dBV/Pa at
1 kHz, which helps to make the signals clean enough
to see well on a scope without preamplification. Its
output impedance is 600 ohms. The main reason the
RS 33-1067 mics have a poorer S/N ratio is that the
cables are not coax, so they pick up a lot of noise
in differential mode. The RS 33-3013 mics are not
really any better for this application; although they
do have coax cables, they have a very low gain. We
should buy phono-to-BNC connectors for the Shure
mics.
Once you have your setup working, try measuring
the period and frequency of the sound from a tuning
fork, and make sure your result for the frequency is
66
Lab 22
The Oscilloscope
Observations
A Periodic and nonperiodic speech sounds
Try making various speech sounds that you can sustain continuously: vowels or certain consonants such
as sh, r, f and so on. Which are periodic and
which are not?
Note that the names we give to the letters of the
alphabet in English are not the same as the speech
sounds represented by the letter. For instance, the
English name for f is ef, which contains a vowel,
e, and a consonant, f. We are interested in the
basic speech sounds, not the names of the letters.
Also, a single letter is often used in the English writing system to represent two sounds. For example,
the word I really has two vowels in it, aaah plus
eee.
B Loud and soft
What differentiates a loud aaah sound from a soft
one?
C High and low pitch
Try singing a vowel, and then singing a higher note
with the same vowel. What changes?
D Differences among vowel sounds
What differentiates the different vowel sounds?
E Lowest and highest notes you can sing
What is the lowest frequency you can sing, and what
is the highest?
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 In the sample oscilloscope trace shown on page
64, what is the period of the waveform? What is its
frequency? The time base is 10 ms.
P2
Analysis
The format of the lab writeup can be informal. Just
describe clearly what you observed and concluded.
67
68
Lab 22
The Oscilloscope
69
23
Apparatus
oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
optical bench . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
HP function generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
transducers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
Goal
Measure the speed of sound.
Setup
Introduction
The setup is shown below. A transducer is a device capable of acting as either a speaker or a microphone. The function generator is used to create a
voltage that varies sinusoidally over time. This voltage is connected through two coax cables, to the oscilloscope and the first transducer, used as a speaker.
The sound waves travel from the first transducer to
the second transducer, used as a microphone. You
will be using both channels of the scope to display
graphs of two waveforms at the same time on the
oscilloscope. As you slide one transducer along the
optical bench, changing the distance between them,
you will change the phase of one wave relative to the
other. Thus, you can determine the distance corresponding to a given number of wavelengths and extract the wavelength of the sound waves accurately.
The wavelength of the sound will be roughly a few
cm. The frequency can be read from the knob on
the function generator. (The time scale of an oscilloscope typically has a systematic error of about
2-5%, so you should not use a measurement of the
period from the scope for this purpose.)
70
Lab 23
transducer from the position shown in the first drawing to the position shown in the second drawing, the
student swept one trace past five complete cycles
of the other trace. (The actual optical benches are
about a meter long, not 8 or 9 cm as shown.) What
is the wavelength of the ultrasound? [Self-check: you
should get 0.6 cm]
P2
Self-Check
Observations
Determine the wavelength and frequency of the sound
waves using the oscilloscope. Find out the temperature in the lab.
Do a quick analysis, without error analysis, during
lab, to see if your result is reasonable.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
Analysis
Determine the speed of sound from your data, and
use the techniques discussed in appendix 3 to derive
error bars.
Compare your result with the previously determined
value of
,
v = (20.1) T
where v is in m/s and T is the absolute temperature,
found by adding 273 to the Celsius temperature. Is
it statistically consistent with your value?
71
24
Electrical Resistance
Apparatus
DC power supply (Thornton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
digital multimeters (Fluke and HP) . . . . . . . 2/group
resistors, various values
unknown electrical components
electrode paste
alligator clips
spare fuses for multimeters Let students replace
fuses themselves.
Goals
Measure curves of voltage versus current for
three objects: your body and two unknown
electrical components.
Determine whether they are ohmic, and if so,
determine their resistances.
Introduction
Your nervous system depends on electrical currents,
and every day you use many devices based on electrical currents without even thinking about it. Despite its ordinariness, the phenomenon of electric
currents passing through liquids (e.g., cellular fluids) and solids (e.g., copper wires) is a subtle one.
For example, we now know that atoms are composed
of smaller, subatomic particles called electrons and
nuclei, and that the electrons and nuclei are electrically charged, i.e., matter is electrical. Thus, we
now have a picture of these electrically charged particles sitting around in matter, ready to create an
electric current by moving in response to an externally applied voltage. Electricity had been used for
practical purposes for a hundred years, however, before the electrical nature of matter was proven at the
turn of the 20th century.
Another subtle issue involves Ohms law,
I=
V
R
72
Lab 24
Electrical Resistance
with non-constant are called non-ohmic. The interesting question is why so many materials are ohmic.
Since we know that electrons and nuclei are bound
together to form atoms, it would be more reasonable
to expect that small voltages, creating small electric
fields, would be unable to break the electrons and
nuclei away from each other, and no current would
flow at all only with fairly large voltages should
the atoms be split up, allowing current to flow. Thus
we would expect R to be infinite for small voltages,
and small for large voltages, which would not be
ohmic behavior. It is only within the last 50 years
that a good explanation has been achieved for the
strange observation that nearly all solids and liquids
are ohmic.
. The symbol
represents a fixed
the objects you are using are not necessarily resistors, or even ohmic.
Observations
A Unknown component A
Setup
Obtain your two unknowns from your instructor.
Group 1 will use unknowns 1A and 1B, group 2 will
use 2A and 2B, and so on.
Here is a simplified version of the basic circuit you
will use for your measurements of I as a function of
V . Although Ive used the symbol for a resistor,
Set up the circuit shown above with unknown component A. Most of your equipment accepts the banana plugs that your cables have on each end, but
to connect to RU and RK you need to stick alligator
clips on the banana plugs. See Appendix 7 for information about how to set up and use the two multimeters. Do not use the pointy probes that come
with the multimeters, because there is no convenient
way to attach them to the circuit just use the banana plug cables. Note when you need three wires to
73
=?
Often when we do this lab, its the first time in several months that the meters have been used. The
small hand-held meters have a battery, which may
be dead. Check the battery icon on the LCD screen.
B Unknown component B
Repeat for unknown component B.
C The human body
Now do the same with the body of one member of
your group. This is not dangerous the maximum voltage available from your power supply is
not enough to hurt you. (Children usually figure
out at some point that touching the terminals of a 9
V battery to their tongue gives an interesting sensation. The currents you will use in this lab are ten to
a hundred times smaller.) You may wish to keep the
voltage below about 5 V or so. At voltages much
higher than that (10 to 12 V), a few subjects get
irritated skin.
You will not want to use the alligator clips. With
the power supply turned off, put small dabs of the
electrode paste on the subjects left wrist and just
below the elbow, and simply lay the banana plug
connectors in the paste. The subject should avoid
moving. The paste is necessary because without it,
most of the resistance would come from the connection through the dry epidermal skin layer, and the
resistance would change erratically. The paste is a
relatively good conductor, and makes a better electrical connection.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Check that you understand the interpretations
of the following color-coded resistor labels:
blue gray orange silver
blue gray orange gold
blue gray red silver
black brown blue silver
74
Lab 24
=
=
=
=
68 k 10%
68 k 5%
6.8 k 10%
1 M 10%
Electrical Resistance
Analysis
Graph I versus V for all three unknowns. Decide
which ones are ohmic and which are non-ohmic. For
the ones that are ohmic, extract a value for the resistance (see appendix 4). Dont bother with analysis
of random errors, because the main source of error in
this lab is the systematic error in the calibration of
the multimeters (and in part C the systematic error
from the subjects fidgeting).
75
25
Apparatus
DC power supply (Thornton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
multimeter (Fluke) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
resistors
Goal
Test the loop and junction rules in two electrical
circuits.
sistors. Passing through the first resistor, our subatomic protagonist passes through a voltage difference of V1 , so its potential energy changes by eV1 .
To use a human analogy, this would be like going up
a hill of a certain height and gaining some gravitational potential energy. Continuing on, it passes
through more voltage differences, eV2 , eV3 ,
and so on. Finally, in a moment of religious transcendence, the electron realizes that life is one big
circuit you always end up coming back where you
started from. If it passed through N resistors before getting back to its starting point, then the total
change in its potential energy was
Introduction
If you ask physicists what are the most fundamentally important principles of their science, almost all
of them will start talking to you about conservation laws. A conservation law is a statement that a
certain measurable quantity cannot be changed. A
conservation law that is easy to understand is the
conservation of mass. No matter what you do, you
cannot create or destroy mass.
The two conservation laws with which we will be
concerned in this lab are conservation of energy and
conservation of charge. Energy is related to voltage,
because voltage is defined as V = P E/q. Charge
is related to current, because current is defined as
I = q/t.
Conservation of charge has an important consequence
for electrical circuits:
When two or more wires come together at a point in
a DC circuit, the total current entering that point
equals the total current leaving it.
Such a coming-together of wires in a circuit is called
a junction. If the current leaving a junction was,
say, greater than the current entering, then the junction would have to be creating electric charge out
of nowhere. (Of course, charge could have been
stored up at that point and released later, but then
it wouldnt be a DC circuit the flow of current
would change over time as the stored charge was
used up.)
Conservation of energy can also be applied to an
electrical circuit. The charge carriers are typically
electrons in copper wires, and an electron has a potential energy equal to eV . Suppose the electron
sets off on a journey through a circuit made of re-
76
Lab 25
e (V1 + . . . + VN )
Observations
A The junction rule
Construct a circuit like the one in the figure, using
the Thornton power supply as your voltage source.
To make things more interesting, dont use equal
resistors. Use nice big resistors (say 100 k to 1
M) this will ensure that you dont burn up the
resistors, and that the multimeters small internal
resistance when used as an ammeter is negligible in
comparison. Insert your multimeter in the circuit to
measure all three currents that you need in order to
test the junction rule.
Analysis
Discuss whether you think your observations agree
with the loop and junction rules, taking into account
systematic and random errors. If this is your first
time doing error analysis, read appendices 2 and 3.
Prelab
Self-Check
Do the analysis in lab.
77
26
Electric Fields
Apparatus
board and U-shaped probe ruler
DC power supply (Thornton)
multimeter
scissors
stencils for drawing electrode shapes on paper
Goals
To be better able to visualize electric fields and
understand their meaning.
To examine the electric fields around certain
charge distributions.
Introduction
By definition, the electric field, E, at a particular
point equals the force on a test charge at that point
divided by the amount of charge, E = F/q. We can
plot the electric field around any charge distribution
by placing a test charge at different locations and
making note of the direction and magnitude of the
force on it. The direction of the electric field at
any point P is the same as the direction of the force
on a positive test charge at P. The result would be
a page covered with arrows of various lengths and
directions, known as a sea of arrows diagram..
In practice, Radio Shack does not sell equipment for
preparing a known test charge and measuring the
force on it, so there is no easy way to measure electric fields. What really is practical to measure at any
given point is the voltage, V , defined as the electrical energy (potential energy) that a test charge
would have at that point, divided by the amount
of charge (E/Q). This quantity would have units
of J/C (Joules per Coulomb), but for convenience
we normally abbreviate this combination of units as
volts. Just as many mechanical phenomena can be
described using either the language of force or the
language of energy, it may be equally useful to describe electrical phenomena either by their electric
fields or by the voltages involved.
Since it is only ever the difference in potential energy (interaction energy) between two points that
can be defined unambiguously, the same is true for
78
Lab 26
Electric Fields
Method
The first figure shows a simplified schematic of the
apparatus. The power supply provides an 8 V voltage difference between the two metal electrodes, drawn
in black. A voltmeter measures the voltage difference between an arbitrary reference voltage and a
point of interest in the gray area around the electrodes. The result will be somewhere between 0 and
8 V. A voltmeter wont actually work if its not part
of a complete circuit, but the gray area is intentionally made from a material that isnt a very good
insulator, so enough current flows to allow the voltmeter to operate.
The photo shows the actual apparatus. The electrodes are painted with silver paint on a detachable
board, which goes underneath the big board. What
you actually see on top is just a piece of paper on
which youll trace the equipotentials with a pen. The
voltmeter is connected to a U-shaped probe with a
metal contact that slides underneath the board, and
a hole in the top piece for your pen.
79
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Looking at a plot of constant-voltage curves,
how could you tell where the strongest electric fields
would be? (Dont just say that the field is strongest
when youre close to the charge, because you may
have a complex charge distribution, and we dont
have any way to see or measure the charge distribution.)
P2 What would the constant-voltage curves look
like in a region of uniform electric field (i.e., one in
which the E vectors are all the same strength, and
all in the same direction)?
Self-Check
If you press down on the board, you can slip the paper between the board and the four buttons you see
at the corners of the board. Tape the paper to your
board, because the buttons arent very dependable.
There are plastic stencils in some of the envelopes,
and you can use these to draw the electrodes accurately onto your paper so you know where they are.
The photo, for example, shows pattern 3 traced onto
the paper.
Now put the U-probe in place so that the top is
above the equipotential board and the bottom of it
is below the board. You will first be looking for
places on the pattern board where the voltage is one
volt look for places where the meter reads 1.0 and
mark them through the hole on the top of your Uprobe with a pencil or pen. You should find a whole
bunch of places there the voltage equals one volt,
so that you can draw a nice constant-voltage curve
connecting them. (If the line goes very far or curves
strangely, you may have to do more.) You can then
repeat the procedure for 2 V, 3 V, and so on. Label
each constant-voltage curve. Once youve finished
tracing the equipotentials, everyone in your group
will need one copy of each of the two patterns you
do, so you will need to photocopy them or simply
trace them by hand.
Repeat this procedure with another pattern. Groups
1 and 4 should do patterns 1 and 2; groups 2 and 5
patterns 1 and 3; groups 3, 6, and 7 patterns 1 and
4.
80
Lab 26
Electric Fields
Analysis
A. After you have completed the plots for two patterns, you should try to draw in electric field vectors.
You will then have two different representations of
the field superimposed on one another. Remember
that electric field vectors are always perpendicular
to constant-voltage curves. The electric field lines
point from high voltage to low voltage, just as the
force on a rolling ball points downhill.
B. Select at least five places on each plot and determine the electric field strength (E) at each of them.
Make sure to include the two points that appear to
have the strongest and weakest fields.
C. For the parallel-plate capacitor, in what region
was the electric field relatively uniform?
81
27
Apparatus
bar magnet (stack of 6 Nd)
compass
graph paper, with 1 cm squares
Hall effect magnetic field probes
LabPro interfaces, DC power supplies, and USB cables
2-meter stick
Goal
Find how the magnetic field of a bar magnet changes
with distance along one of the magnets lines of symmetry.
Introduction
A Qualitative Mapping of the Magnets Field
You can use a compass to map out part of the magnetic field of a bar magnet. The compass is affected
by both the earths field and the bar magnets field,
and points in the direction of their vector sum, but if
you put the compass within a few cm of the bar magnet, youre seeing mostly its field, not the earths.
Investigate the bar magnets field, and sketch it in
your lab notebook.
B Variation of Field With Distance: Deflection
of a Magnetic Compass
You can infer the strength of the bar magnets field
at a given point by putting the compass there and
seeing how much it is deflected.
The task can be simplified quite a bit if you restrict
yourself to measuring the magnetic field at points
along one of the magnets two lines of symmetry,
shown in the figure two pages after this one.
If the magnet is flipped across the vertical axis, the
north and south poles remain just where they were,
and the field is unchanged. That means the entire
magnetic field is also unchanged, and the field at a
point such as point b, along the line of symmetry,
must therefore point straight up.
If the magnet is flipped across the horizontal axis,
then the north and south poles are swapped, and the
field everywhere has to reverse its direction. Thus,
82
Lab 27
Prelab
This part of the lab uses a device called a Hall effect magnetometer for measuring magnetic fields. It
works by sending an electric current through a substance, and measuring the force exerted on those
moving charges by the surrounding magnetic field.
The probe only measures the component of the magnetic field vector that is parallel to its own axis. Plug
the probe into CH 1 of the LabPro interface, connect
the interface to the computers USB port, and plug
the interfaces DC power supply in to it. Start up
version 3 of Logger Pro, and it will automatically
recognize the probe and start displaying magnetic
fields on the screen, in units of mT (millitesla). The
probe has two ranges, one that can read fields up to
0.3 mT, and one that goes up to 6.4 mT. You can
select either one using the switch on the probe. To
test your hypothesis with good precision, you need to
obtain data over the widest possible range of fields.
Always use the more sensitive 0.3 mT scale whenever possible, because it will give better precision
for low fields. Be careful, however, because if you expose the probe to a field thats beyond its maximum
range, it will give incorrect readings. Although you
have an expectation about the direction of the field
(based both on symmetry arguments and on your
qualitative results from part A), its a good idea to
try orienting the probe in different ways to see what
happens.
Analysis
Determine the magnetic field of the bar magnet as
a function of distance. No error analysis is required.
Look for a power-law relationship using the log-log
graphing technique described in appendix 5. Does
the power law hold for all the distances you investigated, or only at large distances?
83
Part B, measuring the variation of the bar magnets field with respect to distance
84
Lab 27
85
28
Apparatus
bar magnet
compass
graph paper, with 1 cm squares
Hall effect magnetic field probes
LabPro interfaces, DC power supplies, and USB cables
Goal
magnetic field. That is, we define the earths magnetic field to have a strength of exactly 1.0 in Fullerton.1 You can infer the strength of the bar magnets
field at a given point by putting the compass there
and seeing how much it is deflected. The standard
notation for magnetic field is B, so we can notate the
fields of the earth and the magnet as Be and Bm .
The task can be simplified quite a bit if you restrict
yourself to measuring the magnetic field at points
along one of the magnets two lines of symmetry,
shown in the figure.
Introduction
This lab is designed to be used along with section
10.3 of Simple Nature, which is about the superposition (i.e., addition) of fields. That section is about
electric fields, and the basic principle is that if we
have two sets of sources (charges) that would individually create fields E1 and E2 , then their combined
field is the vector sum E1 + E2 . Static electric fields,
however, are difficult to control and measure. Magnetic fields are much easier to work with, and the
same vector addition principle applies to them. In
this lab, youll expose a magnetic compass to the
superposed magnetic fields of the earth and a bar
magnet.
A Qualitative Mapping of the Dipoles Field
You can use a compass to map out part of the magnetic field of a bar magnet. It turns out that the
bar magnet is the magnetic equivalent of an electric
dipole. The compass is affected by both the earths
field and the bar magnets field, and points in the
direction of their vector sum, but if you put the compass within a few cm of the bar magnet, youre seeing
mostly its field, not the earths. Investigate the bar
magnets field, and sketch it in your lab notebook.
You should see that it looks like the field a dipole.
B Variation of Field With Distance: Deflection
of a Magnetic Compass
Magnetic fields are actually measured in units of
Tesla (T), but for the purposes of this part of the lab,
well just measure the fields in units of the earths
86
Lab 28
find the distance r at which the deflection is 70 degrees; this angle is choses because its about as big as
it can be without giving very poor relative precision
in the determination of the magnetic field. For your
second data-point, use twice that distance. By what
factor does the field decrease when you double r?
Note that the measurements are very sensitive to the
relative position and orientation of the bar magnet
and compass. You can position them accurately by
laying them both on top of a piece of graph paper,
but before you set all that up, get a preliminary
estimate of the distances youll be using, because
otherwise you can end up wasting your time.
Based on your two data-points, form a hypothesis
about the variation of the dipoles field with distance according to a power law B rp . (If youve
done homework problems 11 and 16 in chapter 10 of
Simple Nature, then you know what p should be for
an electric dipole, based on vector addition of the
electric fields of two charges.)
C Variation of Field With Distance: Hall Effect
Magnetometer
In this part of the lab, you will test your hypothesis
about the power law relationship B rp ; you will
find out whether the field really does obey such a
law, and if it does, you will determine p accurately.
This part of the lab uses a device called a Hall effect
magnetometer for measuring magnetic fields. You
dont know enough about magnetism yet to understand the theory behind the operation of the device, so you can just think of it as a mysterious little
probe, like a wand, that you can place at some point
in space and measure the magnetic field. The probe
only measures the component of the magnetic field
vector that is parallel to its own axis. Plug the probe
into the LabPro interface, connect the interface to
the computers USB port, and plug the interfaces
DC power supply in to it. Start up version 3 of
Logger Pro, and it will automatically recognize the
probe and start displaying magnetic fields on the
screen, in units of mT (millitesla). The probe has
two ranges, one that can read fields up to 0.3 mT,
and one that goes up to 6.4 mT. You can select either one using the switch on the probe. To test your
hypothesis with good precision, you need to obtain
data over the widest possible range of fields. Always use the more sensitive 0.3 mT scale whenever
possible, because it will give better precision for low
fields. Be careful, however, because if you expose the
probe to a field thats beyond its maximum range, it
will give incorrect readings. Although you have an
expectation about the direction of the field (based
both on symmetry arguments and on your qualitative results from part A), its a good idea to try
orienting the probe along different axes to see what
happens. In general, if you want to use the probe to
measure a field whose direction and magnitude are
both unknown, you need to orient the probe along
two different axes, and determine the two components separately.
Two extra complications are that the Earths field
is adding on to the magnets field, and the absolute calibration of the probe is very poor by default. You can make the computer take care of both
of these issues automatically, by zeroing the sensor
(Experiment>Zero) when it is exposed only to the
Earths field, and aligned perpendicular to it. This
causes the computer to impose a calibration such
that the Earths field is considered to be exactly zero.
You may need to redo the calibration each time you
switch scales. If you then carry out the whole measurement with the probe and the magnets field both
aligned east-west, the Earths field has no effect.
D Variation of Field With Angle: Hall Effect Magnetometer
Homework problems 11 and 16 in chapter 10 of Simple Nature, predict that for an electric dipole, the
field in the midplane is exactly half as strong as the
on-axis field, at the same distance. Test this prediction.
Also, find the magnitude of the field at an angle
of 45 degrees between the midplane and the axis.
Since you dont know the direction of the field at
this location based on symmetry arguments (and you
only know it very roughly based on mapping with a
compass in part A), youll need to measure both of
the fields components at this location.
As you plan your observations in this part, youll
need to think about what is the best distance at
which to place the probe. If the distance is too large,
you may find that the field is too weak to measure
with good precision. If the distance is too small, then
the physical size of the probe becomes an issue, since
the exact location at which the probe measures the
field is ill-defined. (The probe measures a voltage
created by the field in a sample of some material,
and that sample has a finite size.)
In part C, all the fields were along a single line, and
there were no angles involved. That made it simple
to get rid of the effect the Earths field. That doesnt
work in this part, however. One way of handling the
difficulty is to flip the magnet by 180 degrees, and
find the difference between the readings for the two
87
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Suppose that when the compass is 11.0 cm from
the magnet, it is 45 degrees away from north. What
is the strength of the bar magnets field at this location in space, in units of the Earths field?
P2 Find Bm /Be in terms of the deflection angle .
As a special case, you should be able to recover your
answer to P1.
Analysis
Determine the magnetic field of the bar magnet as
a function of distance. No error analysis is required.
Look for a power-law relationship using the log-log
graphing technique described in appendix 5. Does
the power law hold for all the distances you investigated, or only at large distances? Compare this
power law result with the result for the variation of
an electric dipoles field with distance.
88
Lab 28
Measuring the variation of the bar magnets field with respect to distance.
89
29
Apparatus
digital multimeter
neodymium magnet (6 discs stuck together)
magnetic compass
resistors
decade resistor boxes
rulers
thread
1-m aluminum rod
stopwatch
photogate
laser
aluminum rods, and clamps
D cell batteries and holders . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
Helmholtz coils (e/m apparatus)
high-precision Helmholtz coil (one set)
Hall effect magnetic field probes
LabPro interfaces, DC power supplies, and USB cables
Goal
Determine the horizontal component of the Earths
magnetic field in Fullerton, to high precision.
Observations
Since youve already used the Hall effect magnetic
field probes in lab 28, you might think that it would
be relatively trivial to measure the Earths magnetic
field precisely. However, the calibration of those
probes is quite poor, so its not possible to get results
with error bars smaller than about 10-20%.
90
Lab 29
The dependence of the period on amplitude. For angles less than 20 degrees, the motion is nearly simple
harmonic, and the period is independent of amplitude to
within about 1%. Higher amplitudes can be used, but it
becomes much more important to control the initial amplitude.
91
Prelab
P1 For an electromagnet consisting of a single circular loop of wire of radius b, the field at a point on
its axis, at a distance z from the plane of the loop,
is given by
B=
Lab 29
Analysis
Find the earths magnetic field, with error bars.
92
2kIb2
c2 (b2 + z 2 )3/2
93
30
Relativity
Apparatus
magnetic balance . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
meter stick . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
multimeter (BK, not HP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
laser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
vernier calipers . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
decade resistor box (General Radio) . . . . . . 1/group
staples
labs DC power supply (30 A)
Setup
Its very important to get the wires A and B perfectly parallel. You also need to minimize the resistance of the apparatus, or else you wont be able to
get enough current through it to cancel the weight
of the staple. Most of the resistance is at the polished metal knife-edges that the moving part of the
balance rests on. It may be necessary to clean the
surfaces, or even to freshen them a little with a file
to remove any layer of oxidation. Since everyone
is sharing the same power supply, you cant turn a
knob to control the voltage being applied to your
setup. Instead, you need to put the decade resistor
box in series in your circuit, and use it to control the
current that flows.
Goal
Measure the speed of light.
Introduction
Oersted discovered that magnetism is an interaction of moving charges with moving charges, but
it wasnt until almost a hundred years later that
Einstein showed why such an interaction must exist:
magnetism occurs as a direct result of his theory of
relativity. Since magnetism is a purely relativistic
effect, and relativistic effects depend on the speed of
light, any measurement of a magnetic effect can be
used to determine the speed of light.
94
Lab 30
Relativity
Analysis
The mass of an aluminum atom is 4.48 1026 kg.
Lets assume that each aluminum atom contributes
one conduction electron, and that the wires have
masses per unit length of 2 g/m these two assumptions are only roughly right, but youll see later
that they end up not mattering.
You can now calculate the number of coulombs per
meter of conduction electrons, , in your wires. By
combining this with your measured levitation current, you can find the average velocity, v, at which
the electrons were drifting through the wire. This velocity is quite small compared to the speed of light,
so the relativistic effect is slight. However, as you
found when you did the prelab, the amount of charge
in a piece of ordinary matter is huge, so even a slight
effect is enough to produce a measurable result.
Now imagine yourself as one of the moving electrons
in the top wire. In your frame of reference, the electrons in the other strip are moving at velocity 2v,
and for each such electron there is a corresponding
proton moving at velocity v relative to you. (You
dont care about the protons and electrons that are
paired off in atoms, because they cancel each other.)
Both the electrons and the protons are squashed together by the relativistic contraction of space, so we
have
1
p = p
1 v 2 /c2
1
e = p
1 (2v)2 /c2
= p
1 v 2 /c2
3v 2
4c2
E` = mg
mg
6k2 v 2
=
4Rc2
`
But v is just the current, so
6kI 2
mg
=
2
4Rc
`
6k`
4Rgm
Prelab
1 (2v)2 /c2
E = 4kqin
(E)(2R`) = 4ktotal `
2ktotal
E=
R
The electrical force Eq = E` cancels out the gravitational force mg acting on the staple, so ignoring
plus and minus signs, we have
95
31
Apparatus
vacuum tube with Helmholtz
coils (Leybold ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
Cenco 33034 HV supply . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
12-V DC power supplies (Thornton) . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
multimeters (Fluke or HP) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2
compass . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
ruler . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
banana-plug cables
Goal
Measure the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron.
Introduction
Why should you believe electrons exist? By the turn
of the twentieth century, not all scientists believed
in the literal reality of atoms, and few could imagine smaller objects from which the atoms themselves
were constructed. Over two thousand years had
elapsed since the Greeks first speculated that atoms
existed based on philosophical arguments without
experimental evidence. During the Middle Ages in
Europe, atomism had been considered highly suspect, and possibly heretical. Finally by the Victorian era, enough evidence had accumulated from
chemical experiments to make a persuasive case for
atoms, but subatomic particles were not even discussed.
If it had taken two millennia to settle the question
of atoms, it is remarkable that another, subatomic
level of structure was brought to light over a period
of only about five years, from 1895 to 1900. Most
of the crucial work was carried out in a series of
experiments by J.J. Thomson, who is therefore often
considered the discoverer of the electron.
In this lab, you will carry out a variation on a crucial
experiment by Thomson, in which he measured the
ratio of the charge of the electron to its mass, q/m.
The basic idea is to observe a beam of electrons in
a region of space where there is an approximately
uniform magnetic field, B. The electrons are emitted
perpendicular to the field, and, it turns out, travel
in a circle in a plane perpendicular to it. The force
96
Lab 31
(1)
v2
r
(2)
mv 2
r
(3)
(4)
Setup
Before beginning, make sure you do not have any
computer disks near the apparatus, because the magnetic field could erase them.
Heater circuit: As with all vacuum tubes, the cathode is heated to make it release electrons more easily.
There is a separate low-voltage power supply built
into the high-voltage supply. It has a set of plugs
that, in different combinations, allow you to get various low voltage values. Use it to supply 6 V to the
terminals marked heater on the vacuum tube. The
tube should start to glow.
Electromagnet circuit: Connect the other Thornton
power supply, in series with an ammeter, to the terminals marked coil. The current from this power
Observations
Make the necessary observations in order to find
q/m, carrying out your plan to deal with the effects
of the Earths field. The high voltage is supposed
to be 300 V, but to get an accurate measurement
of what it really is youll need to use a multimeter
rather than the poorly calibrated meter on the front
of the high voltage supply.
The beam can be measured accurately by using the
glass rod inside the tube, which has a centimeter
scale marked on it.
Be sure to compute q/m before you leave the lab.
That way youll know you didnt forget to measure
something important, and that your result is reasonable compared to the currently accepted value.
There is a glass rod inside the vacuum tube with a
centimeter scale on it, so you can measure the diameter d of the beam circle simply by looking at the
place where the glowing beam hits the scale. This is
much more accurate than holding a ruler up to the
tube, because it eliminates the parallax error that
would be caused by viewing the beam and the ruler
along a line that wasnt perpendicular to the plane of
the beam. However, the manufacturing process used
in making these tubes (theyre probably hand-blown
by a glass blower) isnt very precise, and on many of
the tubes you can easily tell by comparison with the
a ruler that, e.g., the 10.0 cm point on the glass rod
is not really 10.0 cm away from the hole from which
the beam emerges. Past students have painstakingly
determined the appropriate corrections, a, to add to
the observed diameters by the following electrical
method. If you look at your answer to prelab question P1, youll see that the product Br is always a
fixed quantity in this experiment. It therefore follows that Id is also supposed to be constant. They
measured I and d at two different values of I, and
determined the correction k that had to be added to
their d values in order to make the two values of Id
97
a (cm)
0.0
-0.6
-0.2
+0.2
+0.3
P5 Of the three circuits involved in this experiment, which ones need to be hooked up with the
right polarity, and for which ones is the polarity irrelevant?
Analysis
Prelab
2kIb2
+ z 2 )3/2
c2 (b2
98
Lab 31
99
32
Energy in Fields
Apparatus
Heath coils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
0.01 F capacitors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Daedalon function generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
PASCO PI-9587C sine-wave generator . . . . 1/group
oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Goal
Observe how the energy content of a field relates to
the field strength.
Introduction
100
Lab 32
Energy in Fields
Observations
Let E be the magnitude of the electric field between
be the maximum
the capacitor plates, and let E
value of this quantity. It is then convenient to define
a unitless quantity ranging from 1 to 1.
x = E/E,
for the corresponding magSimilarly, let y = B/B
netic quantities. The electric field is proportional
to the voltage difference across the capacitor plates,
which is something we can measure directly using
the oscilloscope:
VC
E
=
x=
E
VC
Magnetic fields are created by moving charges, i.e.,
by currents. Unfortunately, an oscilloscope doesnt
measure current, so theres no equally direct way to
get a handle on the magnetic field. However, all
the current that goes through the coil must also go
through the resistor, and Ohms law relates the current through the resistor to the voltage drop across
B
I
VR
= =
B
I
VR
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Sketch what your graph would look like for
p = 0.1, p = 1, p = 2, and p = 10. (You should
be able to do p = 1 and p = 2 without any computations. For p = 0.1 and p = 10, you can either run
some numbers on your calculator or use your mathematical knowledge to sketch what they would turn
out like.)
Tune the sine wave generators frequency to resonance, and take the data youll need in order to determine x and y at a whole bunch of different places
over one cycle.
Some of the features of the digital oscilloscopes can
make the measurements a lot easier. Doing Acquire>Average
tells the scope to average together a series of up to
128 measurements in order to reduce the amount
of noise. Doing CH 1 MENU>Volts/Div>Fine allows you to scale the display arbitrarily. Rather than
reading voltages by eye from the scopes x-y grid, you
can make the scope give you a measuring cursor. Do
Cursor>Type>Time. Use the top left knob to move
the cursor to different times. Doing Source>CH 1
and Source>CH 2 gives you the voltage measurement for each channel. (Always use Cursor 1, never
Cursor 2.)
The quality of the results can depend a lot on the
quality of the connections. If the display on the
scope changes noticeably when you wiggle the wires,
you have a problem.
Analysis
Plot y versus x on a piece of graph paper. Lets
assume that the energy in a field depends on the
fields strength raised to some power p. Conservation
of energy then gives
|x|p + |y|p = 1
101
33
RC Circuits
Apparatus
oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Pasco PI-9587C function generator
1/group unknown capacitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
known capacitors, 0.05 F . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
resistors of various values
Goals
Observe the exponential curve of a discharging
capacitor.
Determine the capacitance of an unknown capacitor.
Introduction
God bless the struggling high school math teacher,
but some of them seem to have a talent for making interesting and useful ideas seem dull and useless. On certain topics such as the exponential function, ex, the percentage of students who figure out
from their teachers explanation what it really means
and why they should care approaches zero. Thats
a shame, because there are so many cases where its
useful. The graphs show just a few of the important
situations in which this function shows up.
The credit card example is of the form
y = aet/k
closer and closer to zero. For instance, the radioactivity near Chernobyl will never ever become exactly
zero. After a while it will just get too small to pose
any health risk, and at some later time it will get too
small to measure with practical measuring devices.
Why is the exponential function so ubiquitous? Because it occurs whenever a variables rate of change
102
Lab 33
RC Circuits
Suppose we initially charge up the capacitor, making an excess of positive charge on one plate and an
excess of negative on the other. Since a capacitor
behaves like V = Q/C, this creates a voltage difference across the capacitor, and by Kirchoffs loop
rule there must be a voltage drop of equal magnitude across the resistor. By Ohms law, a current
I = V /R = Q/RC will flow through the resistor,
and we have therefore established a proportionality,
Observations
In typical filtering applications, the RC time constant is of the same order of magnitude as the period of a sound vibration, say 1 ms. It is therefore
necessary to observe the changing voltages with an
oscilloscope rather than a multimeter. The oscilloscope needs a repetitive signal, and it is not possible for you to insert and remove a battery in the
circuit hundreds of times a second, so you will use
a function generator to produce a voltage that becomes positive and negative in a repetitive pattern.
Such a wave pattern is known as a square wave. The
mathematical discussion above referred to the exponential decay of the charge on the capacitor, but an
oscilloscope actually measures voltage, not charge.
As shown in the graphs below, the resulting voltage patterns simply look like a chain of exponential
curves strung together.
103
104
Lab 33
RC Circuits
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Plan how you will determine the capacitance
and what data you will need to take.
Analysis
Determine the capacitance, with error analysis (appendices 2 and 3).
105
34
LRC Circuits
Apparatus
Heath coils . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
0.05 F capacitor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
Pasco PI-9587C generator (under lab benches in 416)
1/group
oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Goals
Observe the resonant behavior of an LRC circuit.
Observe how the properties of the resonance
curve change when the L, R, and C values are
changed.
Introduction
Radio, TV, cellular phones its mind-boggling
to imagine the maelstrom of electromagnetic waves
that are constantly pass through us and our surroundings. Perhaps equally surprising is the fact
that a radio can pick up a wave with one particular frequency while rejecting all the others nearly
perfectly. No seasoned cocktail-party veteran could
ever be so successful at tuning out the signals that
are not of interest. What makes radio technology
possible is the phenomenon of resonance, the property of an electrical or mechanical system that makes
it respond far more strongly to a driving force that
varies at the same frequency as that at which the device naturally vibrates. Just as an opera singer can
only break a wineglass by singing the right note, a
radio can be tuned to respond strongly to electrical
forces that oscillate at a particular frequency.
Circuit
As shown in the figure, the circuit consists of the
Heath coil, a 0.05 F capacitor, a 47-ohm resistor,
106
Lab 34
LRC Circuits
and the sine wave generator to supply a driving voltage. You will study the way the circuit resonates,
i.e., responds most strongly to a certain frequency.
Some added complications come from the fact that
the function generator, coil, and oscilloscope do not
behave quite like their idealized versions. The coil
doesnt act like a pure inductor; it also has a certain
amount of DC resistance, simply because the wire
has finite resistance. So in addition to the 47-ohm
resistor, you will have 62 ohms of resistance coming
from the resistance of the wire in the coil. There is
also some internal resistance from the function generator itself, amounting to 600 ohms when you use
the outputs marked high . The R of the circuit
is really the sum of these three series resistances.
You will also want to put the oscilloscope in AC
coupling mode, which filters out any DC component
(additive constant) on the signal. The scope accomplishes this filtering by adding in a very small (20
pF) capacitor, which appears in parallel in the circuit because an oscilloscope, being a voltmeter, is
always used in parallel. In reality, this tiny parallel
capacitance is so small compared to capacitance of
the 0.05 F capacitor that the resulting correction
is negligible (and thats a good thing, because if it
wasnt negligible, the circuit wouldnt be a simple
series LRC circuit, and its behavior would be much
more complicated).
Observations
A Observation of Resonance
By connecting the oscilloscope to measure the voltage across the resistor, you can determine the amount
of power, P = V 2 /R, being taken from the sine
wavegenerator by the circuit and then dissipated as
heat in the resistor. Make sure that your circuit is
hooked up with the resistor connected to the grounded
output of the amplifier, and hook up the oscilloscope
so its grounded connection is on the grounded side
of the resistor. As you change the frequency of the
function generator, you should notice a very strong
response in the circuit centered around one particular frequency, the resonant frequency fo . (You could
measure the voltage drop across the capacitor or the
inductor instead, but all the pictures of resonance
curves in your textbook are graphs of the behavior
of the resistor. The response curve of a capacitor or
1
LC
t
Vpeak,i = Vpeak,0 exp
QT
D Effect of Changing R
Replace the resistor with a 2200-ohm resistor, and
remeasure the FWHM. You should find that the
FWHM has increased in proportion to the resistance.
(Remember that your resistance always includes the
resistance of the coil and the output side of the amplifier.)
Going back to your low-resistance setup, collect voltage data over a wide range of frequencies, covering
at least a factor of 10 above and below the resonant
frequency. You will want to take closely spaced data
near the resonance peak, where the voltage is changing rapidly, and less closely spaced points elsewhere.
Far above and far below the resonance, it will be convenient just to take data at frequencies that change
by successive factors of two.
E Ringing
107
P
Pmax
V
= 20 log10
Vmax
db = 10 log10
Analysis
Check whether the resonant frequency changed by
the correct factor when you changed the capacitance.
For both versions of the circuit, compare the FWHM
of the resonance and the circuits Q to the theoretical
equations
=
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Using the rough value of L given in the lab
manual, compute a preliminary estimate of the angular frequency o , and find the corresponding frequency fo .
P2
108
Lab 34
R
L
and
Q=
also find a 6 db/octave slope in the limit of low frequencies here the impedance is dominated by the
capacitor, but the idea is similar. (More complex filtering circuits can achieve roll-offs more drastic than
6 db/octave.)
LRC Circuits
109
35
Faradays Law
Apparatus
function generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
solenoid (Heath) 1/group plus a few more
oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
10-ohm power resistor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
4-meter wire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
palm-sized pieces of iron or steel
masking tape
rulers
Goals
Observe electric fields induced by changing magnetic fields.
Observations
Introduction
A Qualitative Observations
Physicists hate complication, and when physicist Michael Faraday was first learning physics in the early
19th century, an embarrassingly complex aspect of
the science was the multiplicity of types of forces.
Friction, normal forces, gravity, electric forces, magnetic forces, surface tension the list went on and
on. Today, 200 years later, ask a physicist to enumerate the fundamental forces of nature and the
most likely response will be four: gravity, electromagnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak
nuclear force. Part of the simplification came from
the study of matter at the atomic level, which showed
that apparently unrelated forces such as friction, normal forces, and surface tension were all manifestations of electrical forces among atoms. The other
big simplification came from Faradays experimental
work showing that electric and magnetic forces were
intimately related in previously unexpected ways, so
intimately related in fact that we now refer to the
two sets of force-phenomena under a single term,
electromagnetism.
Even before Faraday, Oersted had shown that there
was at least some relationship between electric and
magnetic forces. An electrical current creates a magnetic field, and magnetic fields exert forces on an
electrical current. In other words, electric forces
are forces of charges acting on charges, and magnetic forces are forces of moving charges on moving
110
Lab 35
Faradays Law
Self-Check
Analysis
Describe your observations in parts A and B and
interpret them in terms of Faradays law.
111
112
Lab 35
Faradays Law
113
36
Electromagnetism
Apparatus
solenoid (Heath) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
oscilloscope . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
2-meter wire with banana plugs . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
magnet (stack of 6 Nd) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
masking tape
string
Goals
Observe electric fields induced by changing magnetic fields.
Qualitative Observations
Build a generator.
In this lab you will use a permanent magnet to produce changing magnetic fields. This causes an electric field to be induced, which you will detect using
a solenoid (spool of wire) connected to an oscilloIntroduction
scope. The electric field drives electrons around the
Physicists hate complication, and when physicist Mich- solenoid, producing a current which is detected by
ael Faraday was first learning physics in the early
the oscilloscope. If you havent used an oscilloscope
19th century, an embarrassingly complex aspect of
before, your instructor will help you to get started.
the science was the multiplicity of types of forces.
Its simply a device for graphing a measured voltage
Friction, normal forces, gravity, electric forces, magas a function of time.
netic forces, surface tension the list went on and
A A constant magnetic field
on. Today, 200 years later, ask a physicist to enumerate the fundamental forces of nature and the
Do you detect any signal on the oscilloscope when
most likely response will be four: gravity, electrothe magnet is simply placed at rest inside the solenoid?
magnetism, the strong nuclear force and the weak
Try the most sensitive voltage scale.
nuclear force. Part of the simplification came from
B A changing magnetic field
the study of matter at the atomic level, which showed
that apparently unrelated forces such as friction, norDo you detect any signal when you move the magnet
mal forces, and surface tension were all manifestaor wiggle it inside the solenoid or near it? What
tions of electrical forces among atoms. The other
happens if you change the speed at which you move
big simplification came from Faradays experimental
the magnet?
work showing that electric and magnetic forces were
intimately related in previously unexpected ways, so
C Moving the solenoid
intimately related in fact that we now refer to the
What happens if you hold the magnet still and move
two sets of force-phenomena under a single term,
the solenoid?
electromagnetism.
The poles of the magnet are its flat faces. In later
Even before Faraday, Oersted had shown that there
parts of the lab you will need to know which is north.
was at least some relationship between electric and
Determine this now by hanging it from a string and
magnetic forces. An electrical current creates a magseeing how it aligns itself with the Earths field. The
netic field, and magnetic fields exert forces on an
pole that points north is called the north pole of the
electrical current. In other words, electric forces
magnet. The field pattern funnels into the body of
are forces of charges acting on charges, and magthe magnet through its south pole, and reemerges at
netic forces are forces of moving charges on moving
Discover Lenzs law.
114
Lab 36
Electromagnetism
Lenzs Law
Lenzs law describes how the clockwise or counterclockwise direction of the induced electric fields whirlpool pattern relates to the changing magnetic field.
The main result of this lab is a determination of how
Lenzs law works. To focus your reasoning, here are
four possible forms for Lenzs law:
1. The electric field forms a pattern that is clockwise
when viewed along the direction of the B vector of
the changing magnetic field.
2. The electric field forms a pattern that is counterclockwise when viewed along the direction of the B
vector of the changing magnetic field.
3. The electric field forms a pattern that is clockwise
when viewed along the direction of the B vector of
the changing magnetic field.
4. The electric field forms a pattern that is coun-
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
115
Self-Check
Determine which version of Lenzs law is correct.
116
Lab 36
Electromagnetism
117
37
Impedance
Observe how the impedances of capacitors and
inductors change with frequency.
Setup
Well start by observing the impedance of a capacitor. Ideally, what we want is this:
Observations
A Impedance of the capacitor
Hook up the circuit as shown, using a 1 k resistance
and a 0.2 F capacitance. The HP signal generator has a ground strap connecting one of its output
terminals to ground. Disconnect this ground strap,
since grounding either side of the signal generator
would mean that either the resistor or the capacitor
would be connected to ground on both sides. Try a
frequency of 100 Hz.
118
Lab 37
Impedance
Analysis
Use your data from part C to determine an experimental value of the coils inductance, and compare
with the theoretical result based on your measurements in part B.
Graph the theoretical and experimental impedance
of the series combination in part D, overlaying them
on the same graph. Show theory as a curve and experiment as discrete data-points. Do the same kind
of graph for the parallel combination.
119
38
Apparatus
rectangular block of plastic (20x10x5 cm,
from blackboard optics kit), or plastic box with water in it
laser
spiral plastic tube and fiber optic cable for demonstrating total internal reflection
ruler
protractor
butcher paper
Goals
Observe the phenomena of refraction and total
internal reflection.
Locate a virtual image in a plastic block by
ray tracing, and compare with the theoretically
predicted position of the image.
Introduction
Without the phenomenon of refraction, the lens of
your eye could not focus light on your retina, and you
would not be able to see. Refraction is the bending of
rays of light that occurs when they pass through the
boundary between two media in which the speed of
light is different. Light entering your eye passes from
air, in which the speed of light is 3.0 108 m/s, into
the watery tissues of your eye, in which it is about
2.2 108 m/s. Since it is inconvenient to write or
say the speed of light in a particular medium, we
usually speak in terms of the index of refraction, n,
defined by
n = c/v,
where c is the speed of light in a vacuum, and v is
the speed of light in the medium in question. Thus,
vacuum has n = 1 by definition. Air, which is not
very dense, does not slow light down very much, so
it has an index of refraction very close to 1. Water
has an index of refraction of about 1.3, meaning that
light moves more slowly in water by a factor of 1/1.3.
Refraction, the bending of light, occurs for the following reason. Imagine, for example, a beam of light
entering a swimming pool at an angle. Because of
the angle, one side of the beam hits the water first,
120
Lab 38
Observations
A Index of refraction of plastic
Make the measurements you have planned in order
to determine the index of refraction of the plastic
block (or the water, whichever you have). The laser
and the block of plastic can simply be laid flat on the
table. Make sure that the laser is pointing towards
the wall.
B Total internal reflection
Try shining the laser into one end of the spiralshaped plastic rod. If you aim it nearly along the
axis of the cable, none will leak out, and if you put
your hand in front of the other end of the rod, you
will see the light coming out the other end. (It will
not be a well-collimated beam any more because the
beam is spread out and distorted when it undergoes
the many reflections on the rough and curved inside
the rod.)
Theres no data to take. The point of having this as
part of the lab is simply that its hard to demonstrate
to a whole class all at once.
C A virtual image
Pick up the block, and have your partner look sideways through it at your finger, touching the surface of the block. Have your partner hold her own
finger next to the block, and move it around until it appears to be as far away as your own finger.
Her brain achieves a perception of depth by subconsciously comparing the images it receives from her
two eyes. Your partner doesnt actually need to be
able to see her own finger, because her brain knows
how to position her arm at a certain point in space.
Measure the distance di , which is the depth of the
image of your finger relative to the front of the block.
Now trace the outline of the block on a piece of paper, remove the block, mark the location of the image, and put the block back on the paper. Shine
the laser at the point where your finger was originally touching the block, observe the refracted beam,
and draw it in. Repeat this whole procedure several
times, with the laser at a variety of angles. Finally,
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
121
Analysis
Using your data for part A, extract the index of refraction. Estimate the accuracy of your raw data,
and determine error bars for your index of refraction.
Using trigonometry and Snells law, make a theoretical calculation of di . Youll need to use the
small-angle approximation sin tan , for
measured in units of radians. (For large angles, i.e.
viewing the finger from way off to one side, the rays
will not converge very closely to form a clear virtual
image.)
Explain your results in part C and their meaning.
Compare your three values for di : the experimental
value based on depth perception, the experimental
value found by ray-tracing with the laser, and the
theoretical value found by trigonometry.
122
Lab 38
123
39
Geometric Optics
Apparatus
optical bench . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
converging lens (unknown focal
length to be measured) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
converging lens, longest available
focal length . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1/group
converging lens, f = 50 mm
1/group lamp and arrow-shaped mask . . . . 1/group
frosted glass screen . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Goals
Observe a real image formed by a convex lens,
and determine its focal length.
Construct a telescope and measure its angular
magnification.
Introduction
The credit for invention of the telescope is disputed,
but Galileo was probably the first person to use one
for astronomy. He first heard of the new invention
when a foreigner visited the court of his royal patrons and attempted to sell it for an exorbitant price.
Hearing through second-hand reports that it consisted of two lenses, Galileo sent an urgent message
to his benefactors not to buy it, and proceeded to
reproduce the device himself. An early advocate of
simple scientific terminology, he wanted the instrument to be called the occhialini, Italian for eyething, rather than the Greek telescope.
His astronomical observations soon poked some gaping holes in the accepted Aristotelian view of the
heavens. Contrary to Aristotles assertion that the
heavenly bodies were perfect and without blemishes,
he found that the moon had mountains and the sun
had spots (the marks on the moon visible to the
naked eye had been explained as optical illusions or
atmospheric phenomena). This put the heavens on
an equal footing with earthly objects, paving the
way for physical theories that would apply to the
whole universe, and specifically for Newtons law of
gravity. He also discovered the four largest moons
of Jupiter, and demonstrated his political savvy by
naming them the Medicean satellites after the powerful Medici family. The fact that they revolved
124
Lab 39
Geometric Optics
Observations
A Focal length of a convex lens
In this part of the lab, youll determine the focal
length of a convex lens. Use your unknown lens
to project a real image on the frosted glass screen.
For your object, use the lamp with the arrow-shaped
Analysis
Determine the focal length of the unknown lens, with
error bars.
Find the angular magnification of your telescope from
your data, with error bars, and compare with theory. Do they agree to within the accuracy of the
measurement?
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
Do the laser safety checklist, Appendix 9, tear it out,
and turn it in at the beginning of lab. If you dont
understand something, dont initial that point, and
ask your instructor for clarification before you start
the lab.
P1 In part A, do you want the object to be closer
to the lens than the lens focal length, exactly at a
distance of one focal length, or farther than the focal
length? What about the screen?
P2 Plan what measurements you will make in part
A and how you will use them to determine the lens
focal length.
125
A refracting telescope
126
Lab 39
Geometric Optics
127
40
Two-Source Interference
Apparatus
ripple tank . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
yellow foam pads . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 4/group
lamp and unfrosted straight-filament bulb
1/group wave generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1/group
big metal L-shaped arms for hanging
the wave generator . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
little metal L-shaped arms with yellow
plastic balls . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
rubber bands . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
Thornton DC voltage source . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
small rubber stopper . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
power strip . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
bucket . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
mop . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
flathead screwdriver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
rulers and protractors
kimwipes and alcohol for cleaning
butcher paper
Goals
Observe how a 2-source interference pattern of
water waves depends on the distance between
the sources.
Observations
Light is really made of waves, not rays, so when we
treated it as rays, we were making an approximation.
You might think that when the time came to treat
light as a wave, things would get very difficult, and
it would be hard to predict or understand anything
without doing complicated calculations.
Life isnt that bad. It turns out that all of the most
important ideas about light as a wave can be seen
128
Lab 40
Two-Source Interference
129
41
Wave Optics
Apparatus
helium-neon laser
1/group optical bench with posts & holders 1/group
high-precision double slits . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
rulers
meter sticks
tape measures
butcher paper
Goals
Observe evidence for the wave nature of light.
Determine the wavelength of the red light emitted by your laser, by measuring a double-slit
diffraction pattern. (The part of the spectrum
that appears red to the human eye covers quite
a large range of wavelengths. A given type of
laser, e.g., He-Ne or solid-state, will produce
one very specific wavelength.)
Determine the approximate diameter of a human hair, using its diffraction pattern.
Introduction
Isaac Newtons epitaph, written by Alexander Pope,
reads:
Nature and Natures laws lay hid in night.
God said let Newton be, and all was light.
Notwithstanding Newtons stature as the greatest
physical scientist who ever lived, its a little ironic
that Pope chose light as a metaphor, because it was
in the study of light that Newton made some of his
worst mistakes. Newton was a firm believer in the
dogma, then unsupported by observation, that matter was composed of atoms, and it seemed logical to
him that light as well should be composed of tiny
particles, or corpuscles. His opinions on the subject were so strong that he influenced generations
of his successors to discount the arguments of Huygens and Grimaldi for the wave nature of light. It
was not until 150 years later that Thomas Young
demonstrated conclusively that light was a wave.
Youngs experiment was incredibly simple, and could
probably have been done in ancient times if some
130
Lab 41
Wave Optics
Observations
A Determination of the wavelength of red light
Set up your laser on your optical bench. You will
want as much space as possible between the laser
and the wall, in order to let the diffraction pattern
spread out as much as possible and reveal its fine
details.
Tear off two small scraps of paper with straight edges.
Hold them close together so they form a single slit.
Hold this improvised single-slit grating in the laser
beam and try to get a single-slit diffraction pattern.
You may have to play around with different widths
for the slit. No quantitative data are required. This
is just to familiarize you with single-slit diffraction.
Make a diffraction pattern with the double-slit grating. See what happens when you hold it in your
hand and rotate it around the axis of the beam.
The diffraction pattern of the double-slit grating consists of a rapidly varying pattern of bright and dark
bars, with a more slowly varying pattern superimposed on top. (See the figure two pages after this
page.) The rapidly varying pattern is the one that
is numerically related to the wavelength, , and the
distance between the slits, d, by the equation
= /d,
where is measured in radians. To make sure you
can see the fine spacing, put your slits several meters
away from the wall. This will necessitate shining it
across the space between lab tables. To make it less
likely that someone will walk through the beam and
get the beam in their eye, put some of the small
desks under the beam. The slit patterns were using
actually have three sets of slits, with the following
dimensions:
w (mm) d (mm)
A .12
.6
B .24
.6
C .24
1.2
The small value of d is typically better, for two reasons: (1) it produces a wider diffraction pattern,
which is easier to see; (2) its easy to get the beam of
the laser to cover both slits. If your diffraction pattern doesnt look like the one in the figure on page
130, typically the reason is that youre only covering one slit with the beam (in which case you get a
single-slit diffraction pattern), or youre not illuminating the two slits equally (giving a funny-looking
pattern with little dog-bones and things in it).
Think about the best way to measure the spacing of
the pattern accurately. Is it best to measure from a
bright part to another bright part, or from dark to
dark? Is it best to measure a single spacing, or take
several spacings and divide by the number to find
what one spacing is? Do it.
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
Read the safety checklist.
P1 Roughly what wavelength do you expect red
light to have?
P2 It is not practical to measure directly using a protractor. Plan how you will determine
indirectly, via trigonometry.
P3 Make a rough order-of-magnitude guess of the
diameter of a human hair.
Analysis
Determine the wavelength of the light and the diameter of the hair, with error bars.
131
132
Lab 41
Wave Optics
133
42
Polarization
Apparatus
laser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
calcite crystal (flattest available) . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
polarizing films . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 2/group
Na gas discharge tube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
photovoltaic cell and collimator . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Goals
tect polarization, and a neuroscientist at the University of Pennsylvania has recently found evidence that
a freshwater fish called the green sunfish can see the
polarization of light (Discover magazine, Oct. 1996).
Most sources of visible light (such as the sun or a
light bulb) are unpolarized. An unpolarized beam
of light contains a random mixture of waves with
many different directions of polarization, all of them
changing from moment to moment, and from point
to point within the beam.
Qualitative Observations
Test quantitatively the hypothesis that polarization relates to the direction of the field vectors in an electromagnetic wave.
Before doing anything else, turn on your gas discharge tube, so it will be warmed up when you are
ready to do part E.
A Double refraction in calcite
Introduction
134
Lab 42
Polarization
ternal axis.
If you simply look through the film, it doesnt look
like anything special everything just looks dimmer, like looking through sunglasses. The light reaching your eye is polarized, but your eye cant tell that.
If you looked at the film under a microscope, youd
see a pattern of stripes, which select only one direction of polarization of the light that passes through.
Now try interposing the film between the laser and
the crystal. The beam reaching the crystal is now
polarized along some specific direction. If you rotate
the film, you change beams direction of polarization. If you try various orientations, you will be able
to find one that makes one of the spots disappear,
and another orientation of the film, at a 90 angle
compared to the first, that makes the other spot go
away. When you hold the film in one of these directions, you are sending a beam into the crystal that
is either purely polarized along the crystals axis or
purely polarized at 90 to the axis.
By now you have already seen what happens if the
film is at an intermediate angle such as 45 . Two
spots appear on the paper in the same places produced by an unpolarized source of light, not just a
single spot at the midpoint. This shows that the
crystal is not just throwing away the parts of the
light that are out of alignment with its axis. What
is happening instead is that the crystal will accept a
beam of light with any polarization whatsoever, and
split it into two beams polarized at 0 and 90 compared
to the crystals axis.
This behavior actually makes sense in terms of the
wave theory of light. Light waves are supposed to
obey the principle of superposition, which says that
waves that pass through each other add on to each
other. A light wave is made of electric and magnetic
fields, which are vectors, so it is vector addition were
135
ures above. Make a prediction about what will happen, and discuss your prediction with your instructor
before you make the actual observation.
The principle of superposition implies that if the 0 and
90 polarizations produce two different spots, then the
two waves superimposed must produce those two spots,
not a single spot at an intermediate location.
136
Lab 42
Polarization
Quantitative Observations
E Intensity of light passing through two polarizing films
In this part of the lab, you will make numerical measurements of the transmission of initially unpolarized
light transmitted through two polarizing films at an
angle to each other. To measure the intensity of
the light that gets through, you will use a photocell,
which is a device that converts light energy into an
electric current.
You will use a voltmeter to measure the voltage
across the photocell when light is shining on it. A
photovoltaic cell is a complicated nonlinear device,
but Ive found empirically that under the conditions
were using in this experiment, the voltage is proportional to the power of the light striking the cell:
twice as much light results in twice the voltage.
This measurement requires a source of light that is
unpolarized, constant in intensity, and comes from
a specific direction so it cant get to the photocell
without going through the polaroids. The ambient
light in the room is nearly unpolarized, but varies
randomly as people walk in front of the light fixtures,
etc. The laser beam is constant in intensity, but as
I was creating this lab I found to my surprise that it
is partially polarized, with a polarization that varies
over time. A more suitable source of light is the
sodium gas discharge tube, which makes a nearly
monochromatic, unpolarized yellow light. Make sure
you have allowed it to warm up for at least 15-20
minutes before using it; before it warms up, it makes
a reddish light, and the polaroids do not work very
well on that color.
Make measurements of the relative intensity of light
transmitted through the two polarizing films, using a
variety of angles . Dont assume that the notches on
the plastic housing of the polarizing films are a good
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
P1 Given the angle between the polarizing films,
predict the ratio |E0 |/|E| of the transmitted electric
field to the incident electric field.
P2 Based on your answer to P1, predict the ratio P 0 /P of the transmitted power to the incident
power.
P3 Sketch a graph of your answer to P2. Superimposed on the same graph, show a qualitative prediction of how it would change if the polaroids were
not 100% perfect at filtering out one component of
the field.
Analysis
Discuss your qualitative results in terms of superposition and vector addition.
Graph your results from part E, and superimpose a
theoretical curve for comparison. Discuss how your
results compare with theory. Since your measurements of light intensity are relative, just scale the
theoretical curve so that its maximum matches that
of the experimental data. (You might think of comparing the intensity transmitted through the two polaroids with the intensity that you get with no polaroids in the way at all. This doesnt really work,
however, because in addition to acting as polarizers,
the polaroids simply absorb a certain percentage of
the light, just as any transparent material would.)
137
43
Apparatus
Hg gas discharge tube
light aperture assembly
lens/grating assembly
photodiode module, support base, and coupling rod
digital multimeter (Fluke)
pieces of plywood
green and yellow filters
of light could be visualized as a stream of machinegun bullets. The electrons would be small targets,
but when a light bullet did score a hit, it packed
enough of an individual wallop to knock the electron out immediately. Based on other experiments
involving the spectrum of light emitted by hot, glowing objects, Einstein also proposed that each photon
had an energy given by
E = hf ,
where f is the frequency of the light and h is Plancks
constant.
Goals
Observe evidence that light has particle properties as well as wave properties.
Measure Plancks constant.
Introduction
The photoelectric effect, a phenomenon in which
light shakes an electron loose from an object, provided the first evidence for wave-particle duality:
the idea that the basic building blocks of light and
matter show a strange mixture of particle and wave
behaviors. At the turn of the twentieth century,
physicists assumed that particle and wave phenomena were completely distinct. Young had shown that
light could undergo interference effects such as diffraction, so it had to be a wave. Since light was a wave
composed of oscillating electric and magnetic fields,
it made sense that when light encountered matter,
it would tend to shake the electrons. It was only
to be expected that something like the photoelectric
effect could happen, with the light shaking the electrons vigorously enough to knock them out of the
atom. The best theoretical estimates, however, were
that light of ordinary intensity would take millions
of years to do the trick it would take that long
for the electron slowly to absorb enough energy to
escape.
The actual experimental observation of the photoelectric effect was therefore an embarrassment. It
started up immediately, not after a million years.
Albert Einstein, better known today for the theory
of relativity, was the first to come up with the radical, and correct, explanation. Einstein simply suggested that in the photoelectric effect, light was behaving as a particle, now called a photon. The beam
138
Lab 43
Optical setup.
Setup
You can use the Hg gas discharge tube to produce
monochromatic light with the following wavelengths:
color
ultraviolet
violet
blue
green
yellow
wavelength (nm)
365
405
436
546
578
Setup
Move the housing containing the grating and lens
until you get a good focus at the front of the photodiode box. The square side needs to be facing away
from the discharge tube.
Diffraction patterns are supposed to be symmetric,
i.e., the m = 1 and m = 1 maxima should be identical. In reality, there is something strange about
this setup that can cause the shorter wavelength
lines (especially the UV line) to be extremely dim
on one side. Check which one is brighter on your
apparatus.
Circuit.
Circuit
The circuit in fig. (a) above is the one shown in
textbooks for this type of experiment. Light comes
in and knocks electrons out of the curved cathode.
If the voltage is turned off, there is no electric field,
so the electrons travel in straight lines; some will
hit the anode, creating a current referred to as the
139
Observations
You can now determine the stopping voltages corresponding to the five different colors of light.
Hints:
The biggest possible source of difficulty is stray
light. The room should be dark when you do
your measurements.
The shortest wavelengths of light (highest frequencies), for which the energy of the photons is the highest, readily produce photoelectrons. The photocurrent is much weaker for
the longer wavelengths. Start with the shortwavelength line and graduate to the more difficult, lower frequencies. Dont forget the filters
for the yellow and green lines!
P2 Plan how you will analyze your data to determine Plancks constant.
Analysis
140
Prelab
Lab 43
141
44
Electron Diffraction
Apparatus
cathode ray tube (Leybold 555 626)
high-voltage power supply (new Leybold)
100-k resistor with banana-plug connectors
Vernier calipers
Goals
Observe wave interference patterns (diffraction
patterns) of electrons, demonstrating that electrons exhibit wave behavior as well as particle
behavior.
Introduction
The most momentous discovery of 20th-century physics
has been that light and matter are not simply made
of waves or particles the basic building blocks of
light and matter are strange entities which display
both wave and particle properties at the same time.
In our course, we have already learned about the
experimental evidence from the photoelectric effect
showing that light is made of units called photons,
which are both particles and waves. That probably disturbed you less than it might have, since you
most likely had no preconceived ideas about whether
light was a particle or a wave. In this lab, however,
you will see direct evidence that electrons, which you
had been completely convinced were particles, also
display the wave-like property of interference. Your
schooling had probably ingrained the particle interpretation of electrons in you so strongly that you
used particle concepts without realizing it. When
you wrote symbols for chemical ions such as Cl
and Ca2+ , you understood them to mean a chlorine
atom with one excess electron and a calcium atom
with two electrons stripped off. By teaching you to
count electrons, your teachers were luring you into
the assumption that electrons were particles. If this
labs evidence for the wave properties of electrons
disturbs you, then you are on your way to a deeper
understanding of what an electron really is both
a particle and a wave.
142
Lab 44
Electron Diffraction
Method
What you are working with is basically the same
kind of vacuum tube as the picture tube in your television. As in a TV, electrons are accelerated through
a voltage and shot in a beam to the front (big end)
of the tube, where they hit a phosphorescent coating and produce a glow. You cannot see the electron
beam itself. There is a very thin carbon foil (it looks
like a tiny piece of soap bubble) near where the neck
joins the spherical part of the tube, and the electrons must pass through the foil before crossing over
to the phosphorescent screen.
The purpose of the carbon foil is to provide an ultrafine diffraction grating the grating consists of
the crystal lattice of the carbon atoms themselves!
Setup
You setup will consist of two circuits, a heater circuit
and the high-voltage circuit.
The heater circuit is to heat the cathode, increasing the velocity with which the electrons move in
the metal and making it easier for some of them
to escape from the cathode. This will produce the
friendly and nostalgia-producing yellow glow which
is characteristic of all vacuum-tube equipment. The
heater is simply a thin piece of wire, which acts as
a resistor when a small voltage is placed across it,
producing heat. Connect the heater connections, labeled F1 and F2, to the 6-V AC outlet at the back
of the HV supply.
Safety
This lab involves the use of voltages of up to 6000 V.
Do not be afraid of the equipment, however; there
is a fuse in the high-voltage supply that limits the
amount of current that it can produce, so it is not
particularly dangerous. Read the safety checklist on
143
Observations
You are now ready to see for yourself the evidence of
the wave nature of electrons, observe the diffraction
pattern for various values of the high voltage, and
figure out what determines the wavelength of the
electrons. You will need to do your measurements
in the dark.
You will measure the s, and thus determine the
wavelength, , for several different voltages. Each
voltage will produce electrons with a different velocity, momentum, and energy.
Hints:
While measuring the diffraction pattern, dont
touch the vacuum tube the static electric
fields of ones body seem to be able to perturb
the pattern.
It is easiest to take measurements at the highest voltages, where the electrons pack a wallop
and make nice bright rings on the phosphor.
Start with the highest voltages and take data
at lower and lower voltages until you cant see
the rings well enough to take precise data. To
get unambiguous results, youll need to take
data with the widest possible range of voltages.
In order to reach a definite conclusion about
what is proportional to, you will need accurate data. Do your best to get good measurements. Pay attention to possible problems incurred by viewing the diffraction patterns from
different angles on different occasions. Try repeating a measurement more than once, and
seeing how big your random errors are.
1 If
you look inside the tube, you can see that X is an extra
electrode sandwiched in between the anode and the cathode.
I think its meant to help produce a focused beam.
144
Lab 44
Electron Diffraction
Prelab
The point of the prelab questions is to make sure
you understand what youre doing, why youre doing it, and how to avoid some common mistakes. If
you dont know the answers, make sure to come to
my office hours before lab and get help! Otherwise
youre just setting yourself up for failure in lab.
The week before you are to do the lab, briefly familiarize yourself visually with the apparatus.
Read the high voltage safety checklist.
P1 It is not practical to measure 1 and 2 directly
with a protractor. Come up with a plan for how to
get the angles indirectly using trigonometry.
The figure shows the vacuum tube as having a particular shape, which is a sphere with the foil and
phosphor at opposite ends of a diamater. In reality,
the tubes were using now are not quite that shape.
To me, they look like they may have been shaped
so that the phosphor surface is a piece of a sphere
centered on the foil. If so, then arc lengths across
the phosphor can be connected to diffraction angles
very simply via the definition of radian measure.
P2 If the voltage difference across which the electrons are accelerated is V , and the known mass and
charge of the electron are m and e, what are the
electrons kinetic energy and momentum, in terms
of V , m, and e? (As a numerical check on your results, you should find that V = 5700 V gives KE =
9.1 1016 J and p = 4.1 1023 kgm/s.)
P3 All youre trying to do based on your graphs is
judge which one could be a graph of a proportionality, i.e., a line passing through the origin. Because
of this, you can omit any constant factors from the
equations you found in P2. When you do this, what
do your expressions turn out to be?
P4 Why is it not logically possible for the wavelength to be proportional to both p and KE? To
both 1/p and 1/KE?
Analysis
Once you have your data, you can try plotting as
a function of, say, the kinetic energy, KE, of the
electrons, and see if it makes something simple like
a straight line. Make sure your graph includes the
origin (see below). You could also try plotting
as a function of the electrons momentum, p, or as
a function of other quantities such as 1/KE, 1/p,
etc. You can simplify your analysis by leaving out
constant factors.
What does seem to be proportional to? Your data
may cover a small enough range of voltage that more
than one graph may look linear. You can rule one
out by checking whether a line fit through the data
points would pass near the origin, as it must for a
proportionality. This is why it is important to have
your graph include the origin.
145
146
Lab 44
Electron Diffraction
147
45
Apparatus
H gas discharge tube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
Hg gas discharge tube . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
spectrometer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
diffraction grating, 600 lines/mm . . . . . . . . . 1/group
small screwdriver . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
black cloth . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
piece of plywood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
block of wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1
penlight . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
light block
Goals
Observe the visible line spectrum of hydrogen.
Determine the mass of the electron.
Introduction
Whats going on inside an atom? The question would
have seemed nonsensical to physicists before the 20th
century the word atom is Greek for unsplittable, and there was no evidence for subatomic
particles. Only after Thomson and Rutherford had
demonstrated the existence of electrons and the nucleus did the atom begin to be imagined as a tiny
solar system, with the electrons moving in elliptical
orbits around the nucleus under the influence of its
electric field. The problem was that physicists knew
very well that accelerating charges emit electromagnetic radiation, as for example in a radio antenna, so
the acceleration of the electrons should have caused
them to emit light, steadily lose energy, and spiral
into the nucleus, all within a microsecond,.
Luckily for us, atoms do not spontaneously shrink
down to nothing, but there was indeed evidence that
atoms could emit light. The spectra emitted by very
hot gases were observed to consist of patterns of discrete lines, each with a specific wavelength. The
process of emitting light always seemed to stop short
of finally annihilating the atom why? Also, why
were only those specific wavelengths emitted?
In this lab, you will study the spectrum of light emitted by the hydrogen atom, the simplest of all atoms,
with just one proton and one electron. In 1885, be-
148
Lab 45
in front is just a numerical constant, and the variation of energy from one level to the next is of the very
simple mathematical form 1/n2 . It was because of
this basic simplicity that the wavelength ratios like
20/27 occurred. The minus sign occurs because the
equation includes both the electrons potential energy and its kinetic energy, and the standard choice
of a reference-level for the potential energy results
in negative values.
Along with the nice formulas came a whole new
set of subversive concepts: that nature is random
in certain ways, that the building blocks of nature
are both particles and waves, and that subatomic
particles do not follow well-defined trajectories as
they travel through space. Today these ridiculoussounding ideas are taken for granted by working physicists, and we are so sure of the theory behind Bohrs
equation that it is now used as one of the most accurate ways of determining the mass of the electron. In
a previous lab, you measured the charge-to-mass ratio of the electron, but like the experiment by Thomson on which it was based, that technique was unable to give the charge and mass separately. Modern techniques allow us to measure wavelengths of
light, and therefore energies of photons, with high
precision, so if all the other fundamental constants
in Bohrs equation are known, we can solve for the
mass of the electron. This lab is really the only example of a high-precision experiment that youll do
in this course done correctly, it allows the determination of the electrons mass to five significant
figures!
Method
To measure a wavelength, you will move the telescope until the diffracted first-order image of the slit
is lined up with the telescopes cross-hairs and then
read off the angle. Note that the angular scale on
the table of the spectroscope actually gives the angle
labeled in the figure, not .
Optics
149
Setup
Turn on both gas discharge tubes right away, to let
them get warmed up.
Adjusting the optics at the start of the experiment is
vital. You do not want to fail to get the adjustments
right and then spend several frustrating hours trying
fruitlessly to make your observations.
First you must check that the cross-hairs are at the
focal point of the objective. If they are, then the image of the slits formed by the objective will be at the
same point in space as the crosshairs. Youll be able
to focus your eye on both simultaneously, and there
will be no parallax error depending on the exact position of your eye. The easiest way to check this is
to look through the telescope at something far away
(& 50 m), and move your head left and right to see if
the crosshairs move relative to the image. Slide the
eyepiece in and out to achieve a comfortable focus.
If this adjustment is not correct, you may need to
move the crosshairs in or out; this is done by sliding
the tube that is just outside the eyepiece tube. (You
need to use the small screwdriver to loosen the screw
150
Lab 45
Observations
Now put the Hg tube behind the collimator. Make
sure the hottest part of the tube is directly in front of
the slits; you will need to use the piece of plywood to
raise the spectrometer to the right height. You want
the tube as close to the slits as possible, and lined
up with the slits as well as possible; you can adjust
this while looking through the telescope at an m = 1
line, so as to make the line as bright as possible.
If your optics are adjusted correctly, you should be
able to see the microscopic bumps and scratches on
the knife edges of the collimator, and there should
be no parallax of the crosshairs relative to the image
of the slits.
Here is a list of the wavelengths of the visible Hg
lines, in nm, to high precision:
404.656
violet
435.833
491.604
546.074
blue
blue-green
green
yellow
dim
sin
c
sin c
151
should not be done between the L and R measurements of the same line. My experience is that the
dimness of the violet hydrogen line makes its wavelength difficult to measure accurately, so including
the violet-violet pair actually worsens the quality of
the final result. Therefore you end up just measuring
two pairs (eight angles).
The angles are measured using a vernier scale, which
is similar to the one on the vernier calipers you have
already used in the first-semester lab course. Your
final reading for an angle will consist of degrees plus
minutes. (One minute of arc, abbreviated 1, is 1/60
of a degree.) The main scale is marked every 30
minutes. Your initial, rough reading is obtained by
noting where the zero of the vernier scale falls on the
main scale, and is of the form xxx 0 plus a little
more or xxx 30 plus a little more. Next, you
should note which line on the vernier scale lines up
most closely with one of the lines on the main scale.
The corresponding number on the vernier scale tells
you how many minutes of arc to add for the plus a
little more.
As a check on your results, everybody in your group
should take independent readings of every angle you
measure in the lab, nudging the telescope to the side
after each reading. Once you have independent results for a particular angle, compare them. If theyre
consistent to within one or two minutes of arc, average them. If theyre not consistent, figure out what
went wrong.
Self-Check
Before leaving lab, make sure that your wavelengths
are consistent with your prediction from prelab question P5, to a precision of no worse than about one
part per thousand.
Analysis
Throughout your analysis, remember that this is
a high-precision experiment, so you dont want to
round off to less than five significant figures.
We assume that the following constants are already
known:
e = 1.6022 1019 C
k = 8.9876 109 Nm2 /C2
h = 6.6261 1034 Js
Prelab
152
Lab 45
,
4 n2
where A is the expression from the Bohr equation
that depends on the mass of the electron. From the
two lines youve measured, extract a value for A.
If your data passed the self-check above, then you
should find that these values for A agree to no worse
than a few parts per thousand at worst. Compute
an average value of A, and extract the mass of the
electron, with error bars.
Finally, there is a small correction that should be
made to the result for the mass of the electron because actually the proton isnt infinitely massive compared to the electron; in terms of the quantity m
153
The spectrometer
Optics.
Prelab question 2.
154
Lab 45
155
46
Apparatus
Michelson interferometer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .1/group
Na and H gas discharge tubes . . . . . . . . . . . . 1/group
tools inside drawer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 set/group
2 4 piece of wood . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3/group
colored filters (Cambosco and others)
Goals
Determine the wavelength of a line of the emission spectrum of sodium or hydrogen.
The Michelson interferometer is a device for measuring the wavelength of light, used most famously in
the Michelson-Morley experiment of 1887, which was
later interpreted as disproving the existence of the
luminiferous aether and supporting Einsteins theory
of special relativity.
156
Lab 46
157
158
Lab
do it like this
(1.234 0.003) 1089 m/s
159
160
Lab
203.4
203.1
202.8
202.9
203.3
202.9
203.2
203.1
Variations of this type are called random errors, because the result is different every time you do the
measurement.
The effects of random errors can be minimized by averaging together many measurements. Some of the
measurements included in the average are too high,
and some are too low, so the average tends to be
better than any individual measurement. The more
measurements you average in, the more precise the
average is. The average of the above measurements
is 203.1 cm. Averaging together many measurements
cannot completely eliminate the random errors, but
it can reduce them.
On the other hand, what if the tape measure was a
little bit stretched out, so that your measurements
always tended to come out too low by 0.3 cm? That
would be an example of a systematic error. Since
the systematic error is the same every time, averaging didnt help us to get rid of it. You probably
had no easy way of finding out exactly the amount
of stretching, so you just had to suspect that there
might a systematic error due to stretching of the
tape measure.
Some scientific writers make a distinction between
the terms accuracy and precision. A precise
measurement is one with small random errors, while
an accurate measurement is one that is actually close
to the true result, having both small random errors
and small systematic errors. Personally, I find the
distinction is made more clearly with the more memorable terms random error and systematic error.
The sign used with error bars normally implies
that random errors are being referred to, since random errors could be either positive or negative, whereas
miles by gallons, to get your final result. When you
systematic errors would always be in the same direccommunicate your result to someone else, they are
tion.
completely uninterested in how accurately you measured the number of miles and how accurately you
measured the gallons. They simply want to know
The goal of error analysis
how accurate your final result was. Was it 22 2
mi/gal, or 22.137 0.002 mi/gal?
Very seldom does the final result of an experiment
come directly off of a clock, ruler, gauge or meter.
Of course the accuracy of the final result is ultiIt is much more common to have raw data consistmately based on and limited by the accuracy of your
ing of direct measurements, and then calculations
raw data. If you are off by 0.2 gallons in your meabased on the raw data that lead to a final result.
surement of the amount of gasoline, then that amount
As an example, if you want to measure your cars
of error will have an effect on your final result. We
gas mileage, your raw data would be the number of
say that the errors in the raw data propagate through
gallons of gas consumed and the number of miles
the calculations. When you are requested to do eryou went. You would then do a calculation, dividing
ror analysis in a lab writeup, that means that you
161
are to use the techniques explained below to determine the error bars on your final result. There are
two sets of techniques youll need to learn:
techniques for finding the accuracy of your raw
data
techniques for using the error bars on your raw
data to infer error bars on your final result
162
Lab
202.9
203.2
202.9
203.3
203.1
203.4
203.1
203.4
0.2
0.1
0.2
0.1
0.0
0.3
0.0
0.3
0.04
0.01
0.04
0.01
0.00
0.09
0.00
0.09
Probability of deviations
You can see that although 0.2 cm is a good figure
for the typical size of the deviations of the measurements of the length of the sofa from the average, some of the deviations are bigger and some are
smaller. Experience has shown that the following
probability estimates tend to hold true for how frequently deviations of various sizes occur:
< 1 standard deviation about 2 times out of 3
1-2 standard deviations about 1 time out of 4
In the following material, Ill use the term standard deviation as a synonym for error bar, but
that does not imply that you must always use the
standard deviation method rather than the guessing
method or the 2/3 rule.
There is a utility on the classs web page for calculating standard deviations.
A common mistake when using the standard deviation technique is to take too few measurements.
For instance, someone might take only two measurements of the length of the sofa, and get 203.4 cm
and 203.4 cm. They would then infer a standard deviation of zero, which would be unrealistically small
because the two measurements happened to come
out the same.
163
Precision of an average
We decided that the standard deviation of our measurements of the length of the couch was 0.2 cm,
i.e., the precision of each individual measurement
was about 0.2 cm. But I told you that the average,
203.1 cm, was more precise than any individual measurement. How precise is the average? The answer
is that the standard deviation of the average equals
standard deviation of one measurement
number of measurements
164
Lab
165
gave
gives
= 2.690 g/cm3
= 2.695 g/cm3
gave
gives
= 2.690 g/cm3
= 2.681 g/cm3
166
Lab
A+B
2
which is 5.1. Since the operation is simply the subtraction of the two numbers, an error in either input just
causes an error in the output that is of the same size.
Therefore
pwe have QW = 1.0 and QC = 0.6, resulting
2
in d = QW
+ QC2 = 1.2. We find that the difference
between the two results is d = 5.1 1.2, which differs
from zero by 5.1/1.2 4 standard deviations. Looking
at the table on page 163, we see that the chances that
d would be this big by chance are extremely small, less
than about one in ten thousand. We can conclude to a
high level of statistical confidence that the two groups
measurements are inconsistent with one another, and
that one group is simply wrong.
167
Appendix 4: Graphing
Review of Graphing
Many of your analyses will involve making graphs.
A graph can be an efficient way of presenting data
visually, assuming you include all the information
needed by the reader to interpret it. That means
labeling the axes and indicating the units in parentheses, as in the example. A title is also helpful.
Make sure that distances along the axes correctly
represent the differences in the quantity being plotted. In the example, it would not have been correct
to space the points evenly in the horizontal direction,
because they were not actually measured at equally
spaced points in time.
Graphing on a Computer
Making graphs by hand in your lab notebook is fine,
but in some cases you may find it saves you time to
do graphs on a computer. For computer graphing,
I recommend OpenOffice, which is free, open-source
software. Its installed on the computers in rooms
416 and 418. Because OpenOffice is free, you can
download it and put it on your own computer at
home without paying money. If you already know
Excel, its very similar you almost cant tell its
a different program.
Heres a brief rundown on using OpenOffice:
On Windows, go to the Start menu and choose
Programs, OpenOffice.org, and Calc. On Linux,
do Applications, Office, OpenOffice.org, Spreadsheet.
168
Lab
Appendix 4: Graphing
169
Use of logarithms
Now we have found c = 3 and p = 2 by inspection,
but that would be much more difficult to do if these
werent all round numbers. A more generally applicable method to use when you suspect a power-law
relationship is to take logarithms of both variables.
It doesnt matter at all what base you use, as long as
you use the same base for both variables. Since the
data above were increasing by powers of 10, well use
logarithms to the base 10, but personally I usually
just use natural logs for this kind of thing.
shrew
rat
capybara
log10 h
0
1
2
log10 f
0.48
2.48
4.48
Power laws
Log-log plots
m = cd3
Even better, the logarithms can be interpreted visually using a graph, as shown on the next page. The
slope of this type of log-log graph gives the power
p. Although it is also possible to extract the prowhich is known as a power law. In the case of a
portionality constant, c, from such a graph, the prolinear relationship, p = 1. Consider the (made-up)
portionality constant is usually much less interesting
experimental data shown in the table.
than p. For instance, we would suspect that if p = 2
h=height of rodent f =food eaten per for rodents, then it might also equal 2 for frogs or
ants. Also, p would be the same regardless of what
at the shoulder day (g)
units we used to measure the variables. The con(cm)
stant c, however, would be different if we used difshrew
1
3
ferent units, and would also probably be different for
rat
10
300
other types of animals.
capybara 100
30,000
Both examples above are of the general mathematical form
y = cxp
,
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Measuring current
When using a meter to measure current, the meter
must be in series with the circuit, so that every electron going by is forced to go through the meter and
contribute to a current in the meter. Many multimeters have more than one scale for measuring a given
thing. For instance, a meter may have a milliamp
scale and an amp scale. One is used for measuring
small currents and the other for large currents. You
may not be sure in advance what scale is appropriate, but thats not big problem once everything
is hooked up, you can try different scales and see
whats appropriate. Use the switch or buttons on the
front to select one of the current scales. The connections to the meter should be made at the common
socket (COM) and at the socket labeled A for
Amperes.
Measuring voltage
For a voltage measurement, use the switch or buttons on the front to select one of the voltage scales.
(If you forget, and hook up the meter while the
switch is still on a current scale, you may blow a
fuse.) You always measure voltage differences with
a meter. One wire connects the meter to one point
in the circuit, and the other connects the meter to
another point in a circuit. The meter measures the
difference in voltage between those two points. For
example, to measure the voltage across a resistor,
you must put the meter in parallel with the resistor. The connections to the meter should be made
at the common socket (COM) and at the socket
labeled V for Volts.
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