Physics307L:People/Wilkinson/Millikan

= Millikan Lab Summary =

Discussion
This lab was based on the Millikan Oil Drop Experiment originally performed by Robert Millikan in 1909. The basis of this experiment was to determine the fundamental charge unit i.e. the charge of the electron. This was a controversial topic in the period because the existence of subatomic particles was still hotly contested among physicists. Our experimental setup was very much like the original Millikan setup. We used a prefabricated apparatus meant for undergraduate physics labs. With this apparatus and some clever data interpretation we were able to get a value that is fairly close to the accepted value.

Theory
The basis of this experiment relies on a simple force balance calculation. A spray of oil drops is injected between two charged plates and the drops are observed to fall under the force of gravity and rise under the force of an applied electric field. With the observations one is able to calculate the overall charge on the oil drop. Once this data is acquired a least squares calculation can be applied to find the least common divisor of the data i.e. the fundamental electric charge. Millikan Lab Data

Results
The accepted charge charge of an electron is $$ q = 1.60217646*10^{-19} C$$ Charge of the Electron. Our determined value after least squares Least Squares approximations is q = 1.62E-19 ± 2.24E-21 C. The error is 1.3%. The standard error of the mean was calculated by dividing the individually calculated charges, dividing them by the determined charge. This value was rounded to get the integer value of how many fundamental charges were in one calculated charge. Knowing these integer values I divided the calculated values by their integer multiples to find how much they differed from the determined fundamental charge. Using this data I took the standard deviation and divided by the square root of the number of charges in question.

Conclusion
It is amazing that one can determine the charge of an electron simply by watching oil drops fall! I believe that the large amount of data we collected allowed us to get close to the accepted value with relatively small error and deviation.

Acknowledgments
Tyler did all of the staring into the telescope and for that I am very thankful. I also want to thank John Callow for the idea to use least squares to approximate the fundamental charge. Without this idea I wouldn't have been able to analyse the very large amount of data that Tyler and I had collected.