PHYS-P 350 Applied Physics Instrumentation Lab

Physics has seats available in a great course this Fall Term: PHYS-P 350 Applied Physics Instrumentation Lab. This course may be of interest to Psychology and Neuroscience students, particularly those who plan to attend graduate school. This is particularly good for students who want to learn lab instrumentation skills.

Professor Long will accept students with either the PHYS-P 221-222 sequence or the PHYS-P 201-202 sequence. He is waiving the P309 co-req/pre-req. He said P350 isn’t Calculus based, so it’s very accessible. This class has both a lecture and lab component and Thursday afternoon lab conflicts are allowed. So, students can leave the lab Thursday afternoon for up to 1 hr and come back to finish it up later. (They have 24-hr access to the lab.)

PHYS-P 350 18143 Applied Physics Instrumentation Lab

The Physics Instrumentation Laboratory (P350) gives students the chance to acquire skills systematically in instrumentation and data acquisition usually obtained intermittently outside of coursework. It provides a detailed introduction to how electronic sensors work, the signals they produce, and the appropriate instruments for measuring these signals. Students also learn about the effects of background or interfering signals, intrinsic noise, and instrumental limitations in order to evaluate the validity of measurements. The sensors and instruments are used in a series of lab exercises in which students construct a complete desktop data acquisition system. Methods of computer interfacing and control are discussed and used extensively throughout.

Topics to be covered include:

Electronic sensors for light, temperature, sound, magnetism, and other physical quantities.

Signal characterization and noise reduction by amplification, averaging, and filtering.

Signal digitization and aliasing.

Detailed operation of test instruments including digital oscilloscopes, multimeters, and function generators.

Instrument triggering and synchronization.

Computer control and readout of instruments

Instrumentation programming with industry-standard software.

This course is especially useful for applied physics students preparing for internships. However, it also develops skills for solving general problems of measurement and control that students can expect to encounter in research, development, or industrial environments in the physical, earth, and biological sciences. It is designed with the expectation that undergraduates who understand the topics will be more immediately valuable as research assistants and interns, and will have a wider variety of initial career opportunities with a bachelor's degree. At the same time, the skills taught are just as useful to the student who pursues graduate-level experimental research.

Detailed knowledge of the physics of the sensors used will be covered in the lectures. This will be helpful but NOT essential for the practical use of the sensors in the lab projects, on which course grades will be based.

The course is three credit hours with one hour of lecture and four hours of laboratory per week. Prerequisites are Physics II or consent of the instructor. Students will have 24-hour access to the lab, thus STUDENTS WITH A CLASS CONFLICT OF 1 HOUR OR LESS DURING THE 4-HOUR LAB SESSION ARE ALSO WELCOME TO ENROLL.

Announced by:
Joshua C Long
Indiana University Physics Department
727 E Third St
Bloomington IN 47405
IU Center for Exploration of Energy and Matter
2401 Milo B Sampson Ln
Bloomington IN 47408
e-mail: jcl@indiana.edu
Tel: (812)856-2237
Lab: (812)855-2936
Fax: (812)855-6645