New Mexico Tech's Physics 451L
Senior Lab
At New Mexico Tech, physics seniors are required
to take PHYS 451L, senior lab, for graduation. This course familiarizes
students with laboratory equipment including the grating spectroscope,
the Fabry-Perot interferometer and the scanning tunneling microscope. The
experiments are designed to bring together concepts learned during previous
physics courses -- stengthening physical intuition and understanding. In
addition to getting hands-on experience, this course introduces students
to error analysis of data.
The course is structured differently from
most lab courses at Tech. Most lab classes complete one lab each week during
the scheduled class period. In senior lab, the class period is used as
a lecture period to get the students familiar with the lab equipment, to
go over the theory behind each experiment, and to teach students how to
do error analysis of their results. Students then do the experiments outside
of class. This has the advantage of allowing experiments to be a bit
more complete -- rather than cutting the experiment into pieces which would
fit into a two hour time frame.
Students get a choice of four of the following labs to complete over
the semester:
For each lab chosen, the student must write up
a clear, concise abstract. At the end of the semester, the student
must also write one complete lab write-up from any of the labs he
or she has chosen to do.
Click here to see a picture of the lab
created by Barbara Jo Mattson