Physics307L F07:People/Trujillo/Neon

Excitation States of Neon

Objective

Here we are first trying to set up the experiment correctly because it is obviously not a piece of cake. Once all the instrumentation is working well, we will need to find the excitation levels of neon by carefully increasing the filament voltage (Vf) and recording the collector current with the alarmed meter. If this is done properly, we should be able to take a large range of readings and plot the collector current (Ic) versus the anode voltage (Va). Once the peaks or excited states are identified, we could then determine the ionization states by reversing the voltage of the collector ring

Data

At first, Tomas and I messed around with the set up and started taking some preliminary data points just to see if the data we were taking was giving the proper values. When we reversed the battery, we seemed to be getting a current reading somewhere close to the values seen in Dr Golds diagram. Of course after zeroing out the alarmed meter we began taking data but failed to observe any peaks or valleys. Since the data collection takes such a long time (fine data points) we lost almost a whole day just crunching useless data. The second week I paired with Ritter and Antonio but seemed to make little progress as far as finding the peaks. Below are the plots that we put together. As you could seen even with the fine points we were unable to ID any excitation points withe be battery in both configurations (I even tried zooming in). Media:NeoExcitation.xls

Summary

We determined that we may not have been doing a couple things. First, we are not exactly sure if we were paying any attention to the current meter when it would swtich ranges. Also, when reading the procedure a bit more carefully, we were instructed to zero out the current meter every time we would manually change ranges. The data shows that were were going absolutely no where.