Formal Reports

Term II formal reports are due at 5pm on April 5th. Please turn in your report, along with all of your lab books to the boxes in the hallway outside the lab.

The lab will be open on M, Th and F from 2-5 until March 30.

Jan 9, 2007 Start of Term II

Labs will start on January 15. In term II you select four two-week long labs. Please have a look at the experiments available on the Lab Manual page to the right. Also look at the information on term II on the About the Course link

A sign-up sheet for the Monday session is available outside the lab now, and sign-up sheets for the Thursday and Friday sessions will be posted on Thursday and Friday.

Nov 30, 2006 Formal Reports

Formal reports and your lab notebooks should be turned in on Monday, December 4. Please place them in the marked boxes in the hallway outside the lab.

A number of you have asked about the level of background material appropriate for the introduction. Please assume that the reader has taken a course similar to PHYS 209, and so knows what inverters, op-amps, nand gates etc. are, so you don't need to go into detail about the individual components. The 74HC14 inverter we use in the oscillator circuits is an exception though, as the hysteresis is a little unusual and should be mentioned. You should explain and analyze the operation of your circuit in detail. It should be possible to predict frequencies for the oscillators for example, and this kind of calculation should be explained.

Nov 27, 2006

Today's lab session was cancelled due to the campus-wide power outage. Unfortunately, that means that people in the Monday session had only two scheduled sessions to complete their project. For people scheduled on Thursday or Friday, nothing has changed. If you are registered in the Monday section, you have a couple of options: if you are able to come into the lab some other time this week to complete your project, please do so. The lab is open every day from 2-5, though you are more likely to find a bench free on Thursday or Friday than on Tuesday or Wednesday. If you aren't able to come in this week and have been unable to complete your project in the allocated time, you can write your formal report on the RLC circuit experiment instead. Again this applies to people registered in the Monday section only.

Nov 10, 2006

There is a second homework assignment available on the schedule page. This assignment is due on Nov. 17. There is also a partial solution set for the first assignment on the schedule page.

Oct 20, 2006

There is a homework assignment due on October 30, 2006, you can fetch a pdf of the assignment on the schedule page.

Sept 21, 2006

Your first assignment is to grab the pdf files at left under the "Intro to Gnuplot" and "tutorial 1 for gnuplot" links. You should use these documents to start to familiarize yourself with gnuplot in the computer lab (Henn 203/205). You should then produce a plot of the data from Experiment 2, and attach it permanently into your lab book.

August 29, 2006

Most of the material on this site is for last year (2005/2006) and will be updated for the 2006/2007 academic year. Tutorials will start on September 6, 2006; labs will start on September 11.

May 8, 2006 Pickup of lab books/formals

If you want to retrieve your lab books and formal report, please send me an email. I will then leave your material in the box outside my office door for you to pick up.

April 6, 2006 Late reports

I have been asked a number of times lately about the possibility of turning formal reports in late. The policy is this: 10% penalty per day (Monday is just one day later than Friday). Due to end of term constraints, any report not turned in by 5 pm Wednesday April 12 will not be marked and will be worth 0.

Lab books

You should be finishing your fourth and final experiment this week. You have one week to complete the analysis and should come to the lab at 2 pm next week (March 13-17) to turn in your book. You can pick it up at 2pm the following week (March 20-24). If you haven't been able to complete four labs due to illness or some other reason you've spoken to me about, please get in touch with me about a make-up lab session.

Feb 27, 2006 Formal Reports

Formal reports will be due on April 7. You have lots of time between now and then. Late formals will be docked 10% per day. You can choose which of the four labs you've completed to do the formal on.

The instructions for this formal report are essentially the same as for term I. To clarify a couple of things: your write-up should be aimed so that if you were to give it to a student coming in to Phys 209 from first year that they would be able to understand what you've done. Style-wise it should aim towards that of a scientific journal article. In the first term, many of you included a point-form list of the equipment used. What would be much better is a diagram of the experimental apparatus that included model numbers where appropriate, and a description in the text of how the equipment is organized.

There are notes on the formal report here.

Jan 31, 2006

No tutorials this week. You can get the notes from the last tutorial on the Notes page to the left.

Jan 16, 2006

There will be tutorials this week. The room for the Wednesday tutorial has changed to the room next door.

Jan 11, 2006

No tutorials this week. We'll have a tutorial next week.

Jan 9, 2006

In general you will need to turn in your prelab assignments on the first day of a new experiment. For this first experiment, you can turn it in at the start of the second week.

You will turn in your lab book one week after completing the experiment.

There are some helpful notes posted on the 'Notes' page to the left, and also on the lab manual page. There are some notes on semiconductor physics that are useful for the diodes and transistors lab, and some notes on useing Mathematica to solve differential equations numerically.

Jan 6, 2006

Updated lab write-ups have now been posted on the Lab Manual page (link on the left). Some of the set-ups have changed a fair bit from last year, so do make sure you have a current write-up. You may need to hit the refresh button in your web browser.

Please point out typos or ambiguities in the write-ups!

Notice that each experiment has PRE-LAB questions. You must have answers for these questions before you come to the lab.

Nov 10, 2005

Assignment #3 has been posted on the schedule page. It is due on Friday Nov. 25th.

Oct 18, 2005

Assignment #2 has been posted on the schedule page. Its due on Friday Oct 28.

Oct 7, 2005

Some of you have made it through experiment #4 very quickly. If you look on the experiment page here, there is now a new supplement to the manual with some more experiments for you to try.

Oct 3, 2005

Assignment #1 has been posted on the schedule page.

Sept 28, 2005

A gnuplot fitting tutorial that you will do in the computer lab during the week of Sept. 26 or Oct. 3 has been posted on the Course Schedule page.

There have been a few changes to the tutorial schedule - it should be firm now till the end of October. Note that the room for most of the Thursday tutorials has changed to Henn 202.

Assignment 1 will be available early in the week of October 3rd, and will be due on October 14th.

Tuesday, Sept. 6th, 2005

The website is presently under heavy construction for the upcoming term. The final version of many files will not be posted until late in the first week of classes, but feel free to browse the current (last year's) version.

IMPORTANT

In the first week of classes it is important to come to an introductory tutorial held in Hebb 13. Please come either Wed. Sept. 7 10:00 AM or Thursday Sept. 8 9:00 AM.

Also in the first week, it is important that you obtain computer access to "physics" and pay for a printer quota. Just click on the computer lab link (and then follow the 'overview' link) to the left for instructions.