Physics307L F09:People/Long/Balmer

Balmer Lab Summary
Under the guidance of | Professor Gold's manual, my partner Tom and I calculated a value for the Rydberg constant R. First we measured the wavelengths of various spectral lines from a hydrogen gas tube and also a deuterium gas tube. I used this website to figure out what value of n to use for each of the wavelengths in the Rydberg formula. Using excel I averaged our recorded wavelengths from four different colored spectral lines, and then plugged them each into the Rydberg formula, I then averaged these values together and calculated the standard error of the mean. Primary notebook entry

Results
From Hydrogen spectra, $$R=1.09421\pm .01821\times 10^{-7} m^{-1}$$

From Deuterium spectra, $$R=1.09416\pm .01746\times 10^{-7} m^{-1}$$

The accepted value from NIST is $$R=1.09737\times 10^{-7} m^{-1}$$

I was extremely pleased with these results, but like I said in my primary lab notebook, I was a little bit skeptical because they seemed almost too good to be true. Hopefully this is not the case!