Students will select an experiment and spend two lab periods setting up the experiment, taking data, and analyzing the data. They will then write a lab report to be distributed to other students in the class not working on the project. The report should follow the standard format.
 | In a few words, describe the experiment. (What?) |
| In a few words, state the objective of the experiment. (Why?) |
| Comment on the procedure. Did you encounter difficulties or surprises? (How?) |
| Present your results and comment on your results. |
Students will demonstrate their projects to other class participants during the third lab period.
Suggestions for experiments:
| Setup an open-cavity He-Ne laser and investigate is transverse modes and longitudinal modes. Use a CCD camera to produce digital images of the transverse modes and analyze those images. |
| Measure the Fresnel diffraction pattern of laser light which reflects off a target and then passes through a pinhole and falls onto a detector. Use a CCD camera as the detector. Investigate how the diffraction pattern changes with target-pinhole distance by analyzing the digital images of the pattern produced at different target-pinhole distances. |
| Select two or three project from the "Projects in Fiber Optics" handbook. We have a kit containing all the components. |
| Select one or two projects from the "Projects in Interferometry" handbook. We do not have the component kit yet, but many projects can be done with components from one or more "Projects in Optics" kits. |
I have placed information about these experiment on the bookshelf in the optics lab. If you are interested in doing a different experiment, please let me know.