As part of a large scale redesign of advanced laboratory courses at Queen's university for both Engineering Physics (60 graduates per year) and Physics (30 graduates per year) we revisited the nuclear and particle physics experiments. The third year laboratory course focuses on "modern physics", cycling through experiments in atomic, optical, nuclear and particle physics. We have only one or two sets of apparatus for each experiment (gamma ray spectroscopy, Compton scattering, alpha particle energy loss, muon lifetime, etc.) so students rotated through the experiments, doing a subset of the experiments available. Since our redesign involved adding a significant open-ended project we couldn't rely on a rotation through these experiments to achieve the learning outcomes intended of the particle physics experiments:
- Work safely with radioactive sources;
- Understand and perform particle counting and spectroscopy experiments;
With secondary learning outcomes of:
- Continue to use software for non-linear curve fitting
- Understand calibration of instruments
- Use and modify simple op-amp amplifiers in experiments
- Comparing model to data
Background: