I. About this course.

Physics 605 is a physics laboratory course. It will teach you about laboratory techniques and measurements, collaborating in a professional manner, figuring things out on your own, debugging experimental setups, and writing up your results. It is also a course on basic electronics for scientists, so we will be learning about and building electronic circuits and making measurements on them. Note that this is a 5 credit course, and you should expect it to be demanding of your time and effort.

Special notice for Spring 2021: Because we are still in the COVID-19 pandemic, and since there it is not possible to have an in-lab experience while keeping to social distancing guidelines, this course will be taught fully remote this semester. See more in section II below.

The course is designed to make you familiar with the use of electronics in a laboratory settings, but it will not turn you into an electrical engineer. You will be studying some circuit theory, and you are expected to spend a significant amount of time in the lab learning about test equipment, circuits, and conduction your own electronics experiments.

We will be doing a significant amount of data acquisition in this course, and we will be using fairly modern electronics. You will be programming microcomputers, and possibly micro-controllers, and using them to perform measurements.

If you expect that you will have difficulty with programming in Python or interacting with a Linux microcomputer, please sign up for Physics 602, which is the computational recitation. If you would like help with programming micro-controllers, an optional part in this course, you may want to sign up for 602 as well.

Every lab, and thus every lab course, will always be a work in progress. I would like to ask for your collaboration and patience. It is quite likely that there will be times that things don’t work out as expected, equipment isn't functioning correctly, and times that you will need to use all the resources you have available to debug some problem. This is what real labs are like, they are about solving real problems. One of the goals of this course is to introduce you to how an actual lab may operate, either in a research setting or a company setting. The good news is that if you properly document your struggles in your reports, this will be taken into account in your grade. If you can show that you did all the work and spend the time trying to make it work, and documented everything, but in the end your circuit just did not quite work, you can still expect a good grade for that report.
Please provide me with feedback throughout the semester on how I can improve the course for you. Each person is different, and I intend to make the course so that you can maximize your learning.

This course does not meet an Inquiry, Discovery Program or Writing Intensive requirement.

People:

Read the rest of the syllabus here.

Approximate Labs Calendar