Madeline Horn edited FloatBarrier__In_ord.tex  over 8 years ago

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\FloatBarrier  In order to improve the accuracy of the data collected, it was essential to subtract off the background. Figure 5 Mercury Fits  features three distinct lines. The blue line is the raw Mercury data, the green line is the quadratic fit of the Mercury data, and the orange line is the final data for Mercury. The orange line was found by taking the original Mercury data (in blue) and subtracting the quadratic fit (in green) to produce the data without the background. The background changes the position of the peaks and dips. By removing the background, the actual Franck-Hertz curve for Mercury could be observed. After removing the background, maxima and minima were found by fitting a quadratic function to a small range of data close to the perceived maximum and minimum values. This produces maxima and minima values with the smallest amount of error. Due to poor resolution, the last few peaks of the Franck-Hertz curve appear as points, and proved difficult to fit using a quadratic function.  Once these values were found, the measured spacings, ($\Delta E_{n}$), between the maxima and minima of the Franck-Hertz curve were plotted against the minimum order (n) of the peaks and dips and analyzed using a linear fit. fit  (Figure 6) Mercury Difference in Peaks and Dips).  The lowest excitation energy of Mercury was determined from the graph by finding the intercept of the linear fit at $n=0.5$. The value of the excitation energy found from the linear fit was then compared to the known value of the lowest excitation energy for Mercury I ($4.6674ev$ and $4.8865ev$ - taken from NIST ASD data). For the dips, when $n=0.5$, $E_{a}=4.589eV$. For the peaks, when$n=0.5$, $E_{a}=4.719eV$ The values found from the linear fits of the data had a percent uncertainty of $1.68 \% -3.42 \%$. Thus, excitation value found for the lowest state of Mercury quantitatively agrees with the expected vale.\\ The fits for the peaks and dips are:  \begin{equation}