Slides on Lasers & Holography

Some slides on lasers from Dr. Kung, and some slides on holography from Prof. Hewitt at Dalhousie University, for your final-exam-studying enjoyment.


(Info on the final will follow very soon. For now, assume it will be a linear combination of the first two exams, roughly twice the length of either.)

This week's lab: spectra

Here you go, something a little bit lighter* for dead week. Our 6th and final lab.

As a reminder, you need to turn in 4 reports for the 6 labs. They are due by the final exam time, and there is not much time left to procrastinate at this point.

(Some of you have turned in lab reports but your lab partners did not. Remind each other about these things.)

*haha

Optics exam 2 solutions

Here you go. Exam 1 solutions to follow soon ...

For Tuesday, group B will have a lab (which I will post this evening) and group A will have a lecture. On Thursday, reverse.

This week

Sorry, I just realized that I inadvertently swapped next week's lectures and this week's. So, we'll talk about holography this week and fiber optics next week.

Exam 2 grades

I've just emailed all of you your exam 2 grades. Apologies for the form letter, but even with a small class this is a tedious task ... if you didn't get a grade emailed to you, let me know.

Overall, it came out well - the average was about 82%, and I think most of you will be relatively happy. The average of the first two exams is about 73%, and in particular many of you that didn't do so well on the first one showed significant improvement. Almost everyone improved, some of you by significant amounts. At this point, we will have to decide if, based on the average exam 1 & 2 scores, any scaling is necessary.

Anyway: well done! Solutions to exams 1 & 2 will show up soon so you can use them to study for the final. Since there is not much new material covered between exam 2 and the final, exam 1 + exam 2 gives you a good idea of what to expect for the final.

Tuesday 19 April

Tuesday, group B will have a lab (procedure) and group A will hear all about fiber optics.

Lab reports

Remember that you need to turn in reports on 4 of the 6 lab experiments for the semester. So far, I've been very happy with the lab reports you've turned in, but I worry that you're going to put the remaining ones off a bit too long ... there is not much time left in the semester.

This is just your friendly reminder that it is that time of the semester again, the time when we all wish we had not put things off :-)

Also, I should point out more clearly that our last few labs followed an inquiry-based method. That is fancy talk for when the professor doesn't quite know what will happen either, and the whole point of the thing is to try and figure something out given the resources you have. As a result, your results for the last several labs may not be as straightforward as you might like, and that is ok! If you did your measurements correctly, analyzed the data the best you could, just do the best you can to explain what happened. It may not fit the nice formulas in the book, and that is partly the point - why didn't it work out? Perhaps the intensity variation within your laser beam illuminated some slits less than others, and your intensity measurements are therefore screwy. Perhaps your gratings are not so simply constructed as the textbook imagines. Could be anything, but if you were careful enough, you can rule out a good many possibilities. Real sciencing is messy and difficult. We're not baking cakes here, and there is no recipe for making it come out perfectly.