Instructor
Prof M Naci Inci
KB-331; Office Hours: by appointment
Course Location and Schedule
Lectures: Th56 @ NH102.
Labs: F1234 or F6789 @ the Modern Physics Lab
Contents: Lectures will provide a broad review of data analysis including, but not limited to topic like statistics, probability distributions, chi-square, linear and polynomial fits. In the lab sessions, 8 experiments will be performed by students:
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q/m ratio of the electron
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Photoelectric effect & the Planck’s constant
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X-ray scattering: The Duane-Hunt displacement law
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Radioactive decay
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Poisson statistics
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The Frank-Hertz experiment
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Scattering in 2D
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The Cavendish experiment
Prerequisites: Phys 311 or Phys 407
Feedback System:
The course has an optional online discussion component hosted on piazza. You need a boun.edu.tr email address to register. The system allows you to post questions to other students or the instructor, find your lab or study partners, and give feedback. Students can stay completely anonymous if they like. Occasionally interesting items about the course and polls will be posted to assess student response.
Textbook:Advanced Physics Experiments by Erhan Gülmez (Boğaziçi University Publications, 1999, ISBN 975-518-129-6). Students are expected to have read the experiments and done some background research before coming to the lab.
Grading: 80% from experiments (pre-quiz & report for each experiment), 20% end-of-the-semester review exam.
Attendance: One way or another, the students are expected to have performed every one of the eight experiments to pass the course. If you miss one experiment, you will be allowed to make-up for it at the end of the semester.
Schedule: The lab schedule for the whole semester will be announced. Please come prepared to each lab so as to get the most benefit from the experiments. Being prepared is also important as you will go through the pre-quiz in the beginning of the lab hours.
Reports: You are expected to return your reports typed. Feel free to use Word, but Latex is encouraged. Each student has to submit his/her own report. They will first be graded by the assistant who has tutored you during the lab hours. Reports have to be returned within one week of the lab (i.e., by the end of Friday of the following week, before 12:00 am). For each passing day (no exceptions for weekends) after the deadline, your report points will be subjected to 10% penalty. The assistants are likely to apply somewhat different criteria while grading your reports - please make sure you ask them about what they are expecting from you.
Links to Interesting/Useful Extra Stuff (Many thanks to Prof Erkcan Özcan for providing the following useful stuff):
In general you might benefit from the lecture notes of Phys 390 and the Matlab code and latex templates used in past semeters. We have also converted the straight line fitting code into a ROOT macro (linefit.C) and an Excel worksheet (linefit.xlsx) as helpful examples.
Here is the Excel worksheet we prepared as a demonstration of four numerical techniques for finding the root of a function. (Here is the ROOT macro that computes the root as a comparison.)
We also wrote a (rather inefficient) C function to numerically integrate any TF1 in ROOT: integrate.C. A similar function demonstrates how to do a one-dimensional integration using the Monte Carlo technique: integrate_mc.C.
Below are some links to things that are interesting/fun and relevant/complementary to the topics we cover.
•The official definition of the terms that we use in measurements are given by BIPM (Bureau International des Poids et Mesures): International Vocabulary of Metrology.
•In Turkey, Ulusal Metroloji Enstitüsü is the body that establishes and maintains national measurement standards in accordance with the SI units. Here you can find about their measurement capabilities. Which quantities are most accurately measurable?
•A topic that came about during our discussions of probability distributions: Weak derivative on wikipedia.
•The most innovative paper on numerical integration: A Mathematical Model for the Determination of Total Area Under Glucose Tolerance and Other Metabolic Curves, M.M. Tai, Diabetes Care, vol. 17 (1994) p. 152.
