Alisha Vira edited section_Discussion_The_neon_experiment__.tex  over 8 years ago

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The neon experiment seemed to have some sort of systematic error. As mentioned, the first excitation level was suppose to occur around 16.62eV. However, this never happened. And the accelerating voltage went all the way up to 80V, as expected, in our data files. That shows that the applied voltage is not at fault nor are the multimeters. We debugged the circuit to see if we were overloading any part of the circuit, and nothing seemed to be overloaded. There could be a very small extra resistance from the cables used but that would not have a drastic effect of a 3V difference between the actual energy level and the experimental energy level that we observed. So, we conclude that there must have been something wrong with the neon tube. There must have been some sort of extra resistance inside the tube that we did not account for. This could be tested by switching out the tubes; however, we do not have these resources available to us. Therefore, our methods and analysis are correct; however, there seems to be a systematic error with the tube.   As for the argon experiment, the data was more precise. For this part of the experiment, we debugged the whole apparatus and replaced all the equipment. In addition, we used a longer period so there would be more data points. Our methods seem to work out quite well for this experiment. We ended up with an experimental error of 7.4$%$. 7.4\%. Our experimental value seems to lie fairly close to the actual value of the first excitation level for argon.