Physics 126 Handouts

Physics 126 Course Handouts, Lectures, Homework, and Software

Course Information

Course materials

Lab notebook and report guidelines

TA office hours

Dawson will hold office hours in Phelps 2532 on Thursdays from 3:00–5:00 PM.

Experiments

Geometrical Optics — notebook and report due Tuesday, April 29, at 11:55 PM via Gradescope.
Wave Nature of Light — notebook and report due Saturday, May 3, at 11:55 PM via Gradescope.
Interferometer
Fiber Optics
Polarization
Aberrations
Spectroscopy
Fourier Optics

From the experiments after #2, you must choose three and turn in notebook/report pairs for each of those. The due dates will be on the next three Fridays at 11:55 PM: May 30, June 6, and June 13. Your course grade will be based on your best three notebooks and best three reports.

Preparing your lab reports and notebooks

All lab reports must be PDF files created with LaTeX, as described in the guidelines handout above. They may be no larger than 11 MB (Megabytes) each. Scale down any images you intend to use in your report so that the number of pixels in the horizontal direction is no more than 1024. For your notebooks, scan or photograph the pages and use LaTeX or some other software to combine them into a single PDF file. The notebook file may be no larger than 17 MB, so you may need to scale the images before combining them. Make sure your notebook images are readable! You will lose credit if the TAs cannot read what you submit.

Please include your perm number, your last name, and the assignment in the filename for everything you turn in. For example, fermi_1602177_notebook1.pdf or fermi_1602177_report1.pdf . Do not use spaces in your filenames. You may use underscores instead.

It is a good idea to compute and save the MD5 checksum of each file you submit. Use Google to find out how to do this on your computer. Upload the checksum to Gradescope as a separate text file along with each notebook or report. That way if you forget the attachment or the file is corrupted, the file can be sent later and the TA will know it was completed on time.

Turning in your work

You will submit your lab notebooks and reports as two separate PDF files using Gradescope: https://www.gradescope.com.

Prepare the PDF files as instructed below and in the Lab Notebook and Report Guidelines above. Click on the Log In button at the top right of the Gradescope home page. Select School Credentials at the lower left of the popup window and use your browser to search for “barb” in the list of schools to find UCSB NetID. Then log in.

Select this class and submit one PDF file for each Gradescope assignment.

If you do not see our class, an account has probably already been created for you using an email different from the one I did (I used the one ending in @ucsb.edu without umail.) In that case, merge your accounts according to the instructions here.

Assignments turned in late will have 10% of the possible remaining credit deducted for each 24-hour period past the deadline.

Examples

Overleaf (set up free account to use)
Overleaf example
Copy Overleaf project

LaTeX example source
LaTeX example figure
LaTeX example PDF output file

Python plotting script: simple_plot.py
Sample data file

Integer histogram script: inthist.py

Optiland example code: pcx.py