Research Skills for Physics (PHY 115L)

Duke University - Ashutosh Kotwal - Spring 2010

This is the home page (http://www.phy.duke.edu/~kotwal/Phy115L) for Physics 115L: Research Skills for Physics given by the Department of Physics of Duke University. These are notes and resources for students taking Physics 115L.

Shown below are examples of research that use the techniques discussed in this course.

Blowfish Liquid Scintillator Array from the High Intensity Gamma Source (HIGS) Facility at Duke University. These liquid scintillator detectors are used to detect the particles produced in the collisions of high energy photons with the target. The plot below shows data recorded by scintillator detectors, and also higher-resolution germanium detectors.
The first segment of this course will discuss data acquisition and analysis techniques. Students will acquire data from a radioactive source using techniques of nuclear physics and analyse these data.

The second segment of the course will introduce interesting theoretical problems in condensed matter physics and show how to solve them using Monte Carlo techniques on a computer.

The third segment of the course will include a tour and exposition of the Duke Free Electron Laser Laboratory, and show how to measure and analyze properties of very high-energy electron beams.