PDF (This will
evolve)Welcome to ENPH 352 for the Spring 2012 term. Please come to the lab on Wednesday, January 4 at 9am for a brief introduction to the class, and to sign up for your first lab. We will begin working on experiments the following week, January 11.
Browsing through the lab manual before the first meeting to determine which experiments interest you would be beneficial.
Based on your sign-up sheets, the experiments you will be working on for the first three weeks are listed
Assignments for experiment 2 are here,
and assignments for experiment 3 are here.
The lab manual is available below in PDF -- we will not provide paper copies. Check to see which three of the approximately seventeen available experiments you wish to try. After the first lab, you will have some time to rank your preferences for your other experiments, and we'll try to accommodate everyone. Many of the experiments have multiple stations, and none have partners.
You will have three weeks of lab time to work on each experiment. You should come prepared for the first week having read the manual for your experiment. You should plan to spend the first session getting familiar with the equipment and doing a dry run through all the parts of the experiment, collecting enough data so that you can go through the analysis.
The second week you should come back and focus on doing a good job of the complete experiment.
In the third week, you will need to arrive with a draft of the presentation (poster/talk/paper) to discuss one on one with the instructor or TA. We do not expect that this will be a final version, but the draft should be more or less complete in terms of content. You will have time to redo any segments of the lab that you found problems with.
Lab manual: PDF (This will
evolve)
Computers with Acrobat Reader are available at the Skin Depth, Vacuum, Lumped Constant Transmission Line, Lock-in, Alpha Range, Gamma Spectroscopy, Computer Control, Servo, Bandedge Thermometry, and FTIR stations. Possibly also Thermal Noise.
The Marking scheme for the course.
| Dates | Task | |
| Jan 4 | meet at 9 am for intro and sign-up | |
| Jan 11 | start lab 1 | |
| Jan 18 | advice on posters; Continue Lab 1; hand in homework | |
| Jan 25 | continue Lab 1; discuss poster drafts one on one. | |
| Feb 1 | poster session; hand in Lab 1 write-up; submit preferences for Lab 2 | |
| Feb 8 | start Lab 2 | |
| Feb 15 | continue Lab 2; advice on papers | |
| Feb 22 | Spring break | |
| Feb 29 | Turn in detailed outline for papers, discuss one-on-one; continue lab 2 | |
| March 7 | start Lab 3; submit completed paper for peer review | |
| March 14 | continue Lab 3; completed review reports due;advice on presentations | |
| March 21 | continue Lab 3; discuss presentation drafts one on one;turn in completed papers | |
| March 28 | oral presentations on Lab 3 |
There is a homework assignment on graphing, due at the start of class on January 18. It asks you to perform some simple graphing and data analysis, to ensure that you have the skills and habits to make simple graphs quickly. (The book Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences by Philip R.Bevington is a good reference.) Solutions to the homework can be found here
It is necessary that you do the computer graphing portion of the homework with a scientific software package such as gnuplot, Origin, Matlab, Mathematica, etc (other similar scientific graphing programs also accepted). Spreadsheets such as Excel are generally not acceptable for producing publication quality graphs.
For an introduction to MATLAB, see Jason Thompson's PDF Matlab notes.
If you elect to use gnuplot, a GNUplot guide is maintained by Henri Gavin at Duke University. Other scientific graphing programs tend to have good help files available within the program.
For your first experiment, you will both turn in a report (in your lab notebook) and prepare a poster. At the poster session you will spend a portion of the time at your poster explaining it to others, and another portion viewing other students' posters.
In order to minimize the expense, we do not expect you to have a single large format poster printed - you may cut and paste individual poster elements (graphics and blocks of text) onto a poster board.
Your second lab report will take the form of a scientific paper based on the American Institute of Physics guidelines for Applied Physics Letters. We will give you more instructions and example papers in the lab. We want to help you produce the best possible papers. In the third week of the second lab, we will ask you to prepare a detailed outline of your paper, with figures in (nearly) final form, and details of what will be in each section. After discussing these outlines with us, you will turn in the outlines for marking the following week. Scientific papers are put through a peer review process. Similarly, we will implement a peer review process where each of you will read two of your classmates papers to provide feedback. The manuscripts for review will have to be turned in electronically.
For your third and final lab, you will both turn in a report and give an oral presentation. A presentation with instructions on how to give a talk is available in PDF and OpenOffice/LibreOffice formats.
A very thorough and helpful presentation by Prof. J. Paul Robinson of Purdue is highly recommended reading; here it is: Prof. Robinson's talk, in powerpoint format. We will have a first look at your talk draft before you actually present it, and give you suggestions individually.
You must come to the talks on time and be present for the presentations by your colleagues. Your presentation will be given using a computer and projector with either PowerPoint, Open Office or PDF documents. You should send your electronic versions ahead of time to your TA. You must bring your lab books to the talks and hand it in at the same time as you give your talk.
NB: You must be present for your oral presentation and poster session as there are no make ups. With the exception of a documented medical or some other extraordinary documented excuse, no show means a mark of zero. This is meant to mimic what would happen at a conference.
Carl Michal (Prof): michal_at_physics.ubc.ca
Qun(Susan) Song (TA): susan_at_phas.ubc.ca
Tongkai Huang (Lab Technician): tongkai_at_physics.ubc.ca
Page Last Updated 2011-12-24 by Carl Michal