UCT Physics PHY321F Laboratory Notebook and Reports

UCT Physics PHY321F
Laboratory Notebook and Reports

A laboratory notebook record must be kept for all experimental work. For some an informal report will suffice; for others a formal laboratory report will be required.

Laboratory notebook

This must be kept by each student, in which details of the experiment are kept while the experiment is in progress. This record, which must be properly dated and headed, will contain rough sketches of apparatus, recording of experimental conditions (e.g. high voltage settings, amplifier gains, data filenames...). It must be signed by a lab demonstrator within a day of concluding the data taking. All data files must be stored in the relevant group directory (and sub-directories) on the PHY300LAB PC computer.

Informal Report

An informal report written entirely within your lab notebook or handouts. This report should clearly include written descriptions and explanations of important phenomena observed during the experiment. In addition, the report should contain any tables, diagrams, calculations, or graphs that are required for the analysis of your experimental results. Be sure to answer all the questions that are asked in the laboratory manual. The informal report should end with a conclusion section that contains a clear statement of the results obtained from the experiment.

Formal Report

This is a report to be wordprocessed and prepared in a style similar to that recommended for publication in ACS or APS publications. It is important that you look carefully at the way tables, figures, equations and graphs are included within the body of the paper and how they are referred to within the text. The style section of this document will provide specific examples of how to display each of these items along with examples. The formal report has the following components:

Title Section: This section must include the title of the lab report, byline, institution and date of submission. The title must in bold type, centered on the page. The byline, institution and date submitted line can be centred. The byline should be an alphabetical list of each of the authors. Institution must be in italic type and date submitted must be in 10 point normal type. Example of title section:

Observation of hyperfine structure in the spectrum of Mercury

Thabo Botha and Jane Zuma

PHY321W, Department of Physics, University of Cape Town

(Submitted 7 May 2001) If the lab is rejected or for any reason a resubmission is required the date line should include the original date and the date of revisions as follows:

(Submitted 7 May 2001; revised 21 May 2001)

Abstract: Briefly describe the experiment including any central results. The abstract should not exceed four or five sentences. The abstract must be in normal type and is indented, eg.:

                       
   A gamma ray detector was calibrated with known
   sources, and used to detect radiation from a range 
   of natural sources. Energy resolution of 6 percent 
   was typically attained. Several nuclides were 
   identified.  However, a weak signal at 2.5 MeV could 
   not be understood.

Introduction: This begins the main body of your paper. Motivate theexperiment and give a concise summary of the science involved, including any mathematical details or theory relevant to the later discussion in the report.
Procedure: Describe the experimental method and discuss how the experiment was performed. Do not repeat information given in the experiment instructions, but refer to that. You shouldinclude a careful drawing (to scale if possible) of relevant parts of the experimental apparatus.
Results: Present your raw data and explain how it was transformed to meaningful quantities for discussion. For most experiments you should present all essential results in both tabular and graphical form . Be sure to look at the style section for required elements for both tables and graphs. This section should also include a discussion of systematic and experimental errors and the limits to your certainty.
Conclusion/Discussion: Discuss your final results and what they mean.
References: If you use any textbooks or reference books in some essential way, or if you quote or compare your results to some reference material, you must cite them in the text of your report and include a bibliography at the end. See the style section for details on reference standards and formats.

Style Guide

General requirements: The manuscript should be typed or printed with a good quality printer, on one side of the paper only, single spaced, on A4 sheets, using type of standard size (font size = 10 or 12 point). Margins of 1.0 in. width should be left on top, sides, and bottom. All pages must be numbered. The report must be done in third person. Any number reported which is less than unity must have a preceeding zero. For example: The mass of the particle was determined to be 0.3 kg. Be sure to include units where necessary.
Graphs: Graphs should have properly labeled axes with correctly abbreviated units. Each graph should be titled and numbered with arabic numerals. Error bars should be used when appropriate. If you conclude that the relationship between the graphed variables is linear ( a straight line) then you should draw a representative straight line for the graph. Do not do a dot to dot drawing.
Tables: Tables must have column headings which include variable identification, symbol, and units. Tables should have a title and should be numbered consecutively with arabic numerals. In the body of the table any values less than unity must be written with a leading zero preceeding the decimal point. There should be a rule above, and a rule below column heads, and a rule at the end of the table. Column heads should be in bold type. Indicate footnotes to the table by superior lower-case letters. Example:
```
Table 1
Detector Resolution for 0.662 keV photons.
______________________________________________________________

Detector		Volume		Height	   Resolution
			(cm^3)		(cm)		(%)

______________________________________________________________

cylindrical		6.8		1.5		6.2
rectangular		8.0		2.0		7.5

______________________________________________________________
```
Equations: Each important equation must have an equation number and should appear on a separate line. The number of the equation, in parentheses, should be placed near the right-hand margin. Example: The momentum (p in MeV) of the particle is determined from the measured radius of curvature (R in cm), and the strength of the magnetic field (B in kG) according to the following equation:
```
		p = 0.3 (R) (B)                                (12)
```
Units: Authors are encouraged to use SI units. Use of SI units is not mandatory, however, if other units are more appropriate. cgs units are often used in atomic physics.
References: Within the body of the paper any reference should be done as a number surrounded by square brackets as the following example illustrates:
```
According to Dyson [1]  Maxwell's equations can be easily shown 
to follow from....
```
If there are more than one references then they can be grouped together:
```
 
The nuclear shell model [1-3] predicts that for even-even nuclei...
```
References to journal or periodical articles should start with the footnote number, followed by the author, the title of the article in quotes, the journal name, the volume number, page number(s) and date. Pay particular attention to the punctuation separating each element of the reference. The second and following lines of any reference should be indented to align with the first line, eg.:
```
   [1] Freeman J. Dyson, "Feynman's proof of the Maxwell
       equations," American Journal of Physics 58(3), 
       209-211 (1990).
```
A reference to a book should include the author, title of book, publisher including date, edition number and page number of referenced item.
```
   [7] David J. Griffiths, Introduction to Electrodynamics
(Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, 1989), 2nd ed., pp. 331-334.
```

020211/dga