Here, a relatively simple laboratory experiment of a physical pendulum, suitable for students of science and engineering in the first courses of university physics, is presented to illustrate its dynamic behavior and to determine its inertia moment. To this end, a long wooden rod of length L = 99.8 cm and cross-section radius R = 1.73 cm was used…

A 2.7 m long stringless pendulum was set up to measure the coefficient of rolling friction of various balls, at higher rolling speeds than usually observed with a short stringless pendulum. The arrangement is easy to set up and makes an impressive classroom demonstration as well as an interesting laboratory experiment.

A popular introductory physics laboratory experiment is one focusing on Snell's law. This is straightforward to complete with lasers and prisms, but here we present an alternative version that guides the students through some of the major historical developments, recreating and analyzing significant experiments. The discovery of Snell's law has a…

The Wilson cloud chamber, invented in 1911 by Scottish physicist Charles Wilson, is a remarkably simple and effective charged particle detector. Cloud chambers were used regularly in particle physics experiments for decades, until being supplanted by bubble chambers. In this article, we describe a lab activity that is suitable for…

As quantum information science and technology (QIST) is becoming more prevalent and occurring not only in research labs but also in industry, many educators are considering how best to incorporate learning about quantum mechanics into various levels of education. Although much of the focus has been on quantum concepts in nonlab courses, current…

The article introduces a low-cost Arduino sensor into the Young's modulus determination laboratory for physics university students. A stainless steel ruler is used as a cantilever beam. Its free end attached a mass is slightly bent and released to make it oscillate as a simple harmonic motion. The Arduino sensor detects the moving mass's frequency…

Ion transport, involving the diffusion and migration of ions within the electrolyte, stands as a fundamental concept in electrochemistry and serves as the driving force for electrochemical reactions. Electric double layers are critical in the fields of electrochemical energy storage and chemical conversion, constituting a central focus of…

Inspired by a commercially produced scattering experiment that was popular beginning in the 1960s, we have developed a Nerf-projectile-based educational activity to demonstrate the basics of particle scattering experiments.

The early 20th century marked a number of transformational experimental and theoretical discoveries in physics. Among them is one that is often neglected in the introductory physics curriculum, which revolutionized our understanding of the molecular world. Evidence for the thermal motions of atoms was first observed by Perrin in 1909, which had…

Although diffusion is the subject of beginning chemistry classes, there are a variety of experiments, such as the spread of perfume in the classroom, that are often "incorrectly" explained by diffusion alone. To eliminate this common misconception, a recently published method is modified to determine the diffusion constant of hydrogen…

We propose an apparatus that emulates the experiment used by Geiger and Marsden in 1913 to investigate alpha particles (Rutherford) scattering. Using a widely available fused deposition modelling 3D-printer, we built a compartmented and easily assembled educational instrument. The whole apparatus is composed of a 3D-printed chamber and an…

Gravity bends light. One can argue this by reasoning that a beam of light should travel in a curved path when viewed from within an accelerating frame of reference, and then invoking Einstein's principle of equivalence, which asserts that the effects observed in an accelerating frame of reference are indistinguishable from the effects observed in…

The pendulum was an important scientific instrument in the 17th century. It became a typical textbook problem in the 18th century. After the introduction of vectors in physics in the 1890s, the pendulum problem started to be progressively solved in the manner we know nowadays from introductory mechanics courses. Starting from "F = ma"…

Light emitting diodes have been used to determine Planck's constant in introductory physics laboratories. One common method relies on the energy of the light emitted by the LED and its relation to the energy gap in the solid of which the diode is composed. However, there could be a problem with the data that are collected for this experiment. For…

The prompt transfer of cutting-edge science into students' curricula is a challenging task. Often research experiments are too complex or expensive to be translated into a secondary or tertiary education setting. Herein, we introduce a laboratory experiment that translates the recently developed research technique of a wavelength dependent,…