PHYS 401 Fall 2024
PHYS 401 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Useful Resources
Writing Reports
- Physics 401 Report-Writing Guidelines
- Physics 401 Report Example
- Physics 401 Report Template, LaTeX Report Template
- A Short LaTeX tutorial!
- Celia Elliott's guidelines for writing an effective abstract
- Celia has a wealth of useful science writing advice under "Resources for Technical Writers and Students" on her department web page
- The Illinois Writers Workshop has good resources on technical writing:
- Introduction to LaTeX: http://tobi.oetiker.ch/lshort/lshort.pdf
Oral Presentation
- Physics 401 Oral Presentation Guidelines
- Physics 401 Oral Presentation Evaluation Form
- Physics 401 Oral Presentation Example
- APS Guidelines for Speakers
- Advice for Physics Speakers by James C. Garland
eLogs
- Physics 401 eLog Guidelines
Error Analysis
- This short discussion of error analysis will provide, along with subsequent lectures, useful guidance for analyzing your data
- Discussion of expressing measurement uncertainty from NIST
- References on probability and statistics from the LBNL Particle Data Group
- Note on error analysis in Millikan oil drop experiment
There are no course textbooks, but we recommend buying or checking out of the library one of the following books:
- Taylor, An Introduction to Error Analysis
- Bevington and Robinson, Data Reduction and Error Analysis for the Physical Sciences
A grab-bag of other books on practical statistics:
- Cowan, Statistical Data Analysis
- Efron and Hastie, Computer Age Statistical Inference, Student Edition: Algorithms, Evidence, and Data Science
- James, Statistical Methods in Experimental Physics
- Sivia and Skilling, Data Analysis: A Bayesian Tutorial
Equipment Reference
- Lab basics: oscilloscope, digital multimeter, signal generator
- Lecture slides (Eugene Colla)
- Intro lab writeup
- Lock-in Amplifier
- Function/Pulse Generator
- Oscilloscope
- Digital Multimeter