Physics 306 Syllabus

Description

By necessity, this particular offering of the course will be very flexible. Students will need to work with a great deal of independence. Lab hours will not fit a particular schedule, there will be an open lab policy, with most experiments being set up two at a time in GNQ 235. However the due-dates for completed experiments will not be flexible, labs must be performed and turned in on-time.

A pair of 50 minute lecture/discussion periods will be set up, on will be on Wednesday afternoons. During these periods preparations will be made for the labs and introductory material discussed.

Part I. This is a crash course in statistics and data analysis. This will cover random deviates and PDFs, error propagation, the Normal and Poisson distributions, Least Squares analysis, Hypothesis testing, and Chebyshev economization of fits. Students will be expected to solve several statistics problems, to write short programs (or run programs provided by me) to generate and analyze data.

There are about thirty problems and exercises in the part-I handout. I encourage you to try them all. Solutions are in the appendix. There are two "experiments" in this section, both dealing with analysis of data and hypothesis testing.

The grade for this portion of the course will be based on a "lab" project involving the statistical analysis of a data set corresponding to a ficticious experiment. This grade accounts for 20 percent of the course grade..

Recommended reading

Part II. Consists of 8-10 modern physics experiments. The lab book will be posted in PDF form on this website.

The grade for this part of the course, 72 percent of the course grade, is derived from the grades of the experiments (assuming nine labs at 7.5 percent of the course grade each). . This phase of the course is integrated with instruction in modern electronics, assigned problems and projects constitute thirteen percent of the course grade.

Grading

All lab reports must be typed in manuscript form. I will accept LaTeX preferentially, and LaTeX templates and tutorials will be made available from the website http://rustam.uwp.edu/306 . I will accept any typed report that follows the minimal style rules posted on the website.
Paper reports will not be accepted. You will upload your completed lab reports via the web into the Report Submission site. Your reports will automatically be time-stamped, and will be "published" on the server in an imaginary physics journal (online).

Students are expected to keep a lab notebook and record all data in pen. In addition, all data must be recorded using a carbon paper, and the carbon copy will be turned in to me, signed and dated by the student. This is for quality control as well as data debugging; if a student forgets to take a piece of data, I will catch this if I have the carbon copy. No lab report will be accepted unless I was carbon-copied on the data at the time it was taken, and no lab reports will be accepted for credit after the due dates.

Resources

Because of the independence with which students are expected to work, they should check the website http://rustam.uwp.edu/306 on a daily basis for installments of the lab book, deadlines, problems, datafiles, programs, assignments, and general news.
Several lab computers in 231 and 237 GNQ are set up with OpenOffice (Microsoft Office compatible) for wordprocessing and spreadsheet work, as well as the MinGW UNIX C, C++, Fortran77 compilers and programming toolchains. If you have WIN32 at home and want MinGW, let me know and I will make a CDROM for you. Two computers in 231 are set up with fptex, a TeX/LaTeX installation for Windows. The UNIX multi-processors also have TeX installations.

I reserve the right to make any changes to this document that I see fit, to respond to evolving circumstances in the course.

Last modified: Sat Apr 29 07:26:58 CDT 2006