To off set the cost of expendable items of the Physics 111B-Lab course, students of the Physics 111B-Lab must pay a Course Materials Fee (CMF) of $165.00. CMF is a kind of fees approved under the authorities contained in the policies of the Office of the President (October 2014) and the Berkeley Campus (October 2009). The fees are assessed after the fifth week of classes in Fall and Spring, and will be included in the students' CARS (Campus Accounts Receivables System) statements.
The goal of the advanced lab is to become familiar with experimental physics research. It is a test run as an experimental physicist with all responsibilities. This includes learning how to conduct meaningful experiments, mastering important experimental instrumentation and methods, analyzing data, drawing meaningful conclusions from them and presenting your results in a succinct manner. For this, you will conduct four experiments and one error-analysis exercise. Every student must complete the Optical Pumping experiment, then you can choose from 19 other experiment in the lab.
Important note: if you repeat this class (including dropping it), you must talk to an instructor about which experiments you should choose. Repeating experiments you have done in a previous semester is not allowed.
Note that there is NO eating or drinking in the 111-Lab anywhere, except in rooms 282 and 286 LeConte on the benches with the BLUE Stripe around it. Thank You from the Staff.
Learn how to think as an experimentalist:
There will be a lot of hard work and frustration, but it is a very rewarding experience, and worth the effort. Often there is no satisfactory solution to a particular problem. Thus you will not be penalized for not getting the correct answer, rather your grade will depend on how systematically you approach the tasks and solve the inevitable problems. The lab is equally challenging to the teaching staff who may not be familiar with all the experiments. Note that the goal of this course is not to teach you the right answer but to instruct you how you can figure out the answers. We are here to help and to guide you in this process. We will teach you problem-solving strategies, for instance, by asking questions rather than giving you the answer you might actually seek.
Complete 5 assignments to receive a grade in this course (1 EAX, 3 written, 1 oral report) Reports will be submitted online through Bcourses.
There are about 20 experiments available for this semester, covering a wide range of fields in Physics, such as atomic physics, condensed-matter physics, optics, nuclear and particle physics. Each experiment has instructions accessible via the navigation bar at the top of the web site but refrain from using them as a recipe. You will be much better off by understanding what you are doing rather than following instructions. You must do four experiments and the exercise on error analysis (the latter in the first week of class) to complete the course requirement. One of the four experiments must be Optical Pumping; The other experiments are divided into two groups based on their overall effort. Please note also that we will take the level of difficulty of the individual experiment into account when we grade; in particular, we expect you to go into much more detail for the "easy" experiments.
You can sign up for the first experiment on the first day of class. For the following labs, we will announce a day from when on you can sign up for the next experiment. Sign up will be by groups as determined on the first day of class. The order of the group will rotate through so that every group will have a good chance to choose at least once their favorite experiment. The first group can start signing up at the beginning of the lab (noon on Mondays, 1pm on other days), the 2nd 1h later, the 3rd at 2h later and 4th group in the last hour of the lab.
Fall 2016, we have the following sign-up days and orders:
The main reason for failing this course is lack of time management resulting in not turning in all reports and/or too many late penalties. A late report will likely mean that the next report will be also late as you will be busy writing the already late report. So please avoid turning in reports late, it just does not pay off.
For successful experimentation, you must have a good understanding of the underlying physics. The pre-lab questions are there to guide you towards the important concepts and we require you to go over them with the teaching staff before starting to do the experiment. You do need to turn in and show your written answers to the pre-lab questions, but you must demonstrate a sufficient understanding of the physics related to the questions; otherwise you will not be allowed to start the experiment.
Before experimenting:
You must complete one oral report per semester on an experiment see Oral Report Guidelines and view the How to do an Oral Report Video. All other reports are in written format (see Written Report Guidelines).
All written reports as of Jan. 2016 must be submitted online through Bcourses.
Note All reports must be submitted online as of Jan. 2016, through Bcourses.
Please read here: http://experimentationlab.berkeley.edu/ReportGuidelines
Some advice on writing the report:
Use common sense and think before acting.
Your final semester grade will be determined from the total points you receive for the reports where we will take the difficulty of each experiment into account. Each of the four lab-reports is graded on a 0 to 100 point basis, while for the error analysis report you can receive up to 50 points. There are many factors that go into determining the grade that a report receives, but we offer the following rough grading guidelines, where >50% is considered a passing grade:
Note also that you must have turned in all four reports and the error analysis report by the deadline of the last report.
Pick up your report in the lab. We try to return your graded report in a timely fashion, i.e. in two weeks. For feed-back on presentation style, we encourage you to go through the report together with the GSI/faculty who graded it.
All written reports are due by 11:50 pm on the due date. Ten (10) points will be deduced for each started week past the due date. No report will be accepted past 11:50 pm on the due date of the last lab report, no exceptions. Getting a late start on your report is no excuse for turning in the report late.
Both the University and the 111 Lab staff take the subject of plagiarism very seriously. Please make sure you understand completely the following and ask questions if ever in doubt: "All data that you present in your reports must be your own. All written work that you submit, except for acknowledged quotations, is to be in your own words. Work copied from a book, webpages (including the experimental instructions), from another student's report, or from any other source without proper citation will, under University rules, earn the student a grade of 'F' for the semester, and possible disciplinary action by the Student Conduct Committee." Note that a proper citation requires that you mark clearly which text/illustration has been copied from as well as the source of it. This is most easily done by adding a note of the form "Illustration taken from Ref. # below the illustration indicating which reference this excerpt belongs to. In case you quote a text, put the quoted text in quotation marks and add the reference number after the text.
You will probably take your data with a partner, and may work together on analyzing these data. But each person must write his or her own report and submit it to 111-Lab Staff for grading. The text of your report, graphs, figures, and derivations of equations must be your own. (This includes graphs generated using standard software: you must each make your own). Please be sure to acknowledge any sources that you use in your reports, and be careful not to copy another's work.
All materials and reports are due by the last due day, no exceptions. Any graded Lab Reports not picked up by the first week of the subsequent semester will be thrown away. Please make sure you return your radiation ring if you use one. Please complete course evaluations and let us know how we can make improvements.