PHYS 4796 Experimental Physics (Spring 2026)

Instructor Jim Napolitano

Assistant Donald Greiner

Assistant Lidia Lapinski

Quick Links

• Canvas page
• Course syllabus
• Recommended lab notebook also available at the Campus Store

Lab Reports

• LaTeX: Overleaf and other distributions
• Report template and the LaTeX source code for it

References and Textbooks

• AJP Resource Letter
• Introduction to Error Analysis, Third Edition
• Experiments in Modern Physics

Warmup Experiments: Everyone does these at the same time

• The simple pendulum (Experiment #1)
• Voltage dividers and passive filters (Experiment #2

Detailed Experiments: Pairs of lab partners rotate through these

• Experiments on Radioactivity
• Cosmic ray muons and their decay
• Two-slit interference with light waves and photons
• Optical Pumping
• Silicon Photomultipliers
• Compton Scattering
• Interferometry