User:Johnny Joe Gonzalez/Notebook/Physics 307L/2009/09/30

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 * style="background-color: #EEE"|[[Image:owwnotebook_icon.png|128px]] Balmer Series
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Safety

 * Check for exposed wires or loose connections as voltages as high as 5kV can be used.
 * There are glass components, be careful when handling the glass tubes.
 * One of the glass tubes is filled with mercury, as mercury is toxic to humans take care when handling it.
 * careful not to break or damage the prism

Materials

 * Dr. Gold's Lab manualGold's Physics 307L Manual
 * Constant-Deviation Spectrometer ser.(12610)
 * Spectrum tube power supply(model )
 * 5 sheets of paper (for measuring slit width)
 * mercury tube
 * flashlight

Procedure

 * First we aligned the prism so that the light from the lamp is reflected to the eyepiece. This part can take sometime, though once it's aligned then calibrating the spectrometer is simple.

Calibrating
First thing we did is calibrated the spectrometer. We did this by locating a line of the mercury spectrum and compared where we found the lines as opposed to the data given, we then adjusted the line until it matched the data, after which we double checked our results by searching for other lines on the mercury spectrum and then compared it to our results.

Procedure Continued

 * Once calibrated, we replaced the mercury lamp with a hydrogen lamp.
 * Following the same procedures as when calibrating, we looked for the four lines of the hydrogen spectrum and then recorded the measured wavelengths. The wavelength's measurements are shown below
 * The first data chart is for day 1 only one trial was made since we were still getting familiar with the equipment. Day 2 data is seen below for both hydrogen and Dueterium.

Data Analysis
Next we found the Rydberg Constant by taking the measured wavelengths and applying it to the equation: $$\frac{1}{\lambda }=R(\frac{1}{2^{2}}-\frac{1}{n^{2}})$$, where, n=3,4,5.... and isolating R $$R=\frac{1}{\lambda }\frac{1}{(\frac{1}{2^{2}}-\frac{1}{n^{2}})}$$

Unfortunately the day 2 data only has one measurement for hydrogen, so our error will be considerable, when compared to our data for dueterium.

Plugging in the variables we get the following solutions for: $$R=\frac{1}{\lambda}\frac{1}{(\frac{1}{2^{2}-n^{2}})}$$ I know that the number for the first violet line is off, I think that we had accidently recorded the second violet line instead of the first on our second measurement, thus the huge shift in error there, but I still felt it was important to write down all of the data found. The next set of R values are for the dueterium.



Other Links and Acknowledgements
|Link I used to obtain the n values for the line spectrum |The wiki page I used to confirm the n values and further help my understanding of the Balmer series My lab summaryMy Balmer Series Lab Summary