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.SJK 11:46, 21 October 2009 (EDT)
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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.
SJK 11:51, 21 October 2009 (EDT)
data
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Data Analysis
Next we found the Rydberg Constant by taking the measured wavelengths and applying it to the equation: [math]\displaystyle{ \frac{1}{\lambda }=R(\frac{1}{2^{2}}-\frac{1}{n^{2}}) }[/math], where, n=3,4,5....
and isolating R [math]\displaystyle{ R=\frac{1}{\lambda }\frac{1}{(\frac{1}{2^{2}}-\frac{1}{n^{2}})} }[/math]
SJK 12:04, 21 October 2009 (EDT)
Unfortunately the day 2 data only has one measurement for hydrogen, so our error will be considerable, when compared to our data for dueterium.
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Plugging in the variables we get the following solutions for:
[math]\displaystyle{ R=\frac{1}{\lambda}\frac{1}{(\frac{1}{2^{2}-n^{2}})} }[/math]
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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.SJK 11:55, 21 October 2009 (EDT)
The next set of R values are for the dueterium.
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