Experimental Physics Reports

January 2025 - May 2025

OSU's physics department requires every student to take a senior lab course as a veritable capstone for the degree. I completed three advanced physics experiments during this course in collaboration with Emily Macbeth and other physics seniors.

This lab was intentionally open ended; students were provided with a list of roughly 15 different experiments and had to select three for their group to complete. Typically, each experiment came with an explicit goal and a predetermined apparatus used to accomplish that goal, but lab documentation was focused on the general operation of the apparatus rather than explicitly describing how to achieve the stated goal. Students were placed into groups of three for in-lab procedures, and jointly worked to create lab procedures and data analysis techniques for each experiment. Studnets were additionally required to produce individual reports and graphs based on the collected data.

Experiment 1: Johnson Noise

This experiment is focused on Johnson Noise, a voltage fluctuation generated via the thermodynamic motion of charge carriers which is present in all conducting mediums. The experiment uses Johnson noise to calculate the Boltzmann constant to within two standard deviations of its generally accepted value.

Experiment 2: Nuclear Magnetic Resonance

This experiment analyzes nuclear magnetic resonance, a physical phenomenon where magnetic particles can be made to precess about an external magnetic field. The experiment uses the Earth's magnetic field to induce precession in a variety of liquid samples, which in generate an induced current in a surronding Helmholtz coil. The properties of this current signal can then be used to quantify the magnetic physical properties of the liquid samples and the strength of Earth's magnetic field.

Experiment 3: Torsional Oscillation

This experiment considered the behavior of a torsional oscillator in order to analyze simple harmonic motion. The provided apparatus was subjected to several damping regimes with different dependencies on angular velocity to verify the forms of various harmonic motion differential equations. These differential equations are additionally used to calculate the moment of inertia and torsional constant of the apparatus.