PHYS 401 Fall 2023
PHYS 401 :: Physics Illinois :: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Useful Resources
Writing Reports
- Physics 401 Report-Writing Guidelines
- Example 401 report
- 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
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 (both are also available online through the University library):
- 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