Some PHY-312 students and their projects
- Julia Kamenetzky studied extrasolar planets by observing planet transits.
- Adam Culberson and Lucas Jorgensen built and studied a system to wirelessly transfer electric power using magnetic resonance.
- Jeffrey Klein, Michelle Peterson, Erin Rooney, and Kyle Slack constructed a scanning tunneling microscope capable of resolving objects at an atomic dimension.
- Julie Jozwiak and Ian Dees constructed a Foucault pendulum which demonstrates that the Earth is rotating.
- Logan Squiers and Zoe Downing built a Ruby laser for the purpose of making pulsed laser holograms.
- Sarah Collins and Esther Chapman built and studied Solar cells using raspberry juice.
- Tim Harrington-Taber built a device for studying sonoluminescence which uses ultrasound to produce light.
- Tessa Parshall, Tom Reyes, and Scott Tolliver built a spectrohelioscope capable of observing the sun's corona in broad daylight. (Shown on right.)
- Nathan Means and Paul Searing built a Nitrogen laser which produced extremely short (ns) pulses of ultraviolet light using low pressure nitrogen as the lasing medium.
- Chad Compton built a TEA laser which produced extremely short (ns) pulses of ultraviolet light using air at atmospheric pressure as the lasing medium.
- Dan Blackwell designed and built a chaotic electrical circuit to gain a deeper grasp of the concept of deterministic chaos.
- Joe Seabloom designed and built an electrostatic motor that can be powered off the Earth's electric field.
Course description
Students in this course spend the entire block researching a single topic in experimental physics. Before the start of the course, students will select a topic of interest then meet with the professor to work out a reasonable project. During this course, students will often have to design and build their own equipment, then use the equipment to perform a detailed measurement. During the course, students will present regular lab talks to the rest of the class and keep lab notebooks detailing their work. At the end of the course, students will write a paper and present their experimental results in a forum open to the Cornell community.
Prerequisites: Physics 302 and 303 and one additional course at the 200 or 300 level
Instructor: Sherman
Class Schedule
The class will normally meet each day from 8:30 a.m. to 3:00 p.m. with a break for lunch.
|
