General notes

A lab report is not an essay where you are graded and paid by its length! The shorter it is the better. I would say you should limit yourselves to about 2 pages, maybe 3 if you have a lot of plots. The most prestigious physics journals usually limit publications to 3 pages. The Nobel prize winning paper “GW151226: Observation of Gravitational Waves from a 22-Solar-Mass Binary Black Hole Coalescence” has it content fit to 7 pages.

We will penalize unnecessary long reports!

The good lab report is self contained. I.e. a reader should grasp why you are doing your lab, how you do, what did you get, how you interpret the data, and what are the conclusions. Ideally, based on the experiment description a reader should be able to recreate the experiment.

Required lab reports sections

Any lab report must have the following sections

• Header
  • Title
  • Author list (Submitter and lab partners)
  • Date of preparation
  • Abstract (What was done and what was obtained)
• Introduction
  • How is this lab in the overall physics context, i.e. big picture
  • Theoretical formulae
• Experiment description (setup and data taking)
  • Sketch of the experiment
  • Short description of the data procedure
  • What are the settings
  • Connection between measured values and theoretical formulas
• Data analysis
  • PLOTS!!! We are human beings, we are not design to look at tables with more than 3 numbers (it is ok for a list of experimental conditions but not results). So if you changed something and measured outcomes, make a plot of such dependency. You probably have a table in you logbook, but report must have the plot of this dependency. Any plot must have
    • caption
    • axes labeled and with units
    • data points
    • if you plot more than one dependency, clear different markers with legends (color change is not sufficient: most of the people still print in black and white; a journal will charge you extra for colors)
    • a fit based on theory, so we can easily see if the theory bogus or correct
    • DO NOT USE JPEG file format for your plots
  • Error analysis
    • uncertainty estimate (error propagation) and how it was obtained
    • how good is the fit, i.e. residuals discussion
• Conclusions
  • Short summary of results
    • Did experiment work, matched the theory or not
    • If you have an expected value (which is for the most of the labs because we are recreating someone else experiments), did it match or not
    • If there is a discrepancy, what is the source of it
• Bibliography (when appropriate)
  • This is you way to shave the written part. Use: see the full proof or calculation of it in a given reference.
  • If you use a value, where did you get it
    • Hint. Most of the time it the lab manual

Approximate weight of the lab report sections

Remember

• if you have a number, it must have a unit of measure.
• uncertainty must have no more than one significant digit (the only exception if the first digit is one)

Additionally we will look for a writing quality.