Experiments   

    Core or Non-core experiments?

                 You will do just a few of the 48 experiments existing in the First Year Physics Laboratory!

Students in PHY110Y and PHY138Y will complete several required modules during the Fall term. You can choose from either the core or non-core experiments during the Spring term. To help your three person subgroup make selections, read the following brief descriptions of the experiments. The complete guide sheets to some experiments are included below. You can print out individual pages as required by your subgroup.

Exp1 - Curved Air Track, The Air Table, The Flywheel (complete guide sheet), The Torsion Pendulum, The Gyroscope, Oscillations of a Sphere on a Concave Surface, The Wilberforce Spring, Boyle's Law, Surface Tension, Viscosity of Water by Capillary Flow

Exp2 - Heat Capacity (complete guide sheet), Thermal Expansion, Vapour Pressure of Water (complete guide sheet), Absolute Zero (complete guide sheet)

Exp3 - The Mechanical Equivalent of Heat, DC Circuits (complete guide sheet), Thermistors and Diodes, The Electrocardiogram, Digital Electronics, Charge and Discharge of a Capacitor, Faraday's Law and the AC Generator

Exp4 - Lens Optics, Physics of Sound, The Acoustic Interferometer, The Speed of Sound in a Solid (complete guide sheet), Standing Waves and Acoustic Resonance, The Speed of Sound in a Pure Gas

Exp5 - Interference and Diffraction (Using a Laser), Refraction of Light, Microwave Optics, Optical Activity, Electron Diffraction, Optical Fibers, Spectra, Gamma-Ray Spectra,  Radioactivity in the Air, Scattering, X-Ray and Gamma-Ray Absorption in Matter, e/m for an Electron, The Speed of Light, The Cavendish Experiment, The Millikan Oil-Drop Experiment, Echolocation by Ultrasound

                                                                                   
 

Spectra

                                

Talented and/or interested students are encouraged to consider the non-core experiments and especially the "two weight" ones, which are often more difficult and more interesting than the one weight ones. Classic experiments to measure fundamental constants such as e/m for an electron, the speed of light, and the universal gravitational constant or to prove the quantification of the electric charge are among the non-core set. Students can also consider various experiments investigating wave phenomena or atomic and nuclear physics.

 

e/m for an electron

          We encourage students to do any experiment in the lab as a substitute for one or more core experiments. A free-choice experiment can be either from the core 

          or non-core set.