Information about the labs

Latest update: October 31, 2012.

The labs are soon around the corner. Hopefully you are not too exhausted from working on the oblig and thankfully we have tried to make the labs a lot more fun this year. We hope that you’ll enjoy learning about these concepts of electromagnetism.

Time and place

The deadline to register for the lab was last friday. If you have not registered, please contact us as soon as possible!

The labs are held from week 45 to week 47 (room FV225). Each week you will attend one lab which lasts four hours. The labs are held multiple times, each week and they are as follows:

  • Mondays 08-12
  • Tuesdays 13-17
  • Wednesdays 08-12
  • Thursdays 13-17
  • Fridays 13-17

Again, we repeat that you are only attending one of these times each week. In other words, there are a total of 12 hours of lab during the whole semester.

Prelab and exercises

Each lab has a prelab and exercises. You have to do the prelab questions before showing up at the lab. These are multiple choice and should be fairly quickly done.

In the end of each lab there is a set of exercises that are supposed to be done at the lab. Some might however be done at home before the lab, which is perfectly fine if you feel like doing so to save time.

Topics

The topics of the labs are

You may download the lab texts now and have a look through them. They are mostly complete, but some changes may occur – also to the questions. We will update this post whenever we change the labs, so make sure to check back here and see if there are any updates the day before you have your lab.

Good luck!

Do not blindly trust the solutions!

The solutions are meant as a guide on one way to think when solving different problems in electromagnetism, and they are not guaranteed to be clean of errors. When you stumble across an answer or a piece of logic you do not agree with it is most likely you who are correct.

You can help us in identifying errors in the solutions by posting on the weekly post.  This might even trigger a discussion which everyone will learn from and appreciate!

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Equation sheet

We have put together an equation sheet that you will be handed on the mid-term and final exam. The sheet is not complete, so please be aware of errors and missing equations, and check in here frequently to download the latest version.

If you miss something that you would like to have included in the equation sheet, don’t hesitate to ask us to include it. (We can’t guarantee that we’ll accept any proposal, though.)

 

Maxwell’s equations

Last weekend Fysisk fagutvalg arranged the annual cabin trip, and in that regard Jørgen Midtbø held a lecture on Maxwell’s equations. Those of you who were there are already familiar with the content, but for the rest of you we post the note from this lecture that may be useful to read through. You can find the note here

Enjoy!

Note on the magnetic vector potential

Magnetic dipole (Source: Wikipedia*)

In electrostatics we found it very convenient to introduce the concept of the electric potential. It gave us a straight forward way of calculating electric fields without doing any vector calculations or using any symmetry arguments. Can we introduce something similar for magnetic fields?  It turns out that because magnetic fields are divergence less we can find a vector potential who’s curl gives us the magnetic field! Even though this magnetic vector potential is not as useful as the electrostatic potential in elementary applications, it turns out to be of major importance in electrodynamics as well as classical mechanics and quantum mechanics. It might therefore be a good idea to get familiar with the concept and some of it’s properties already, especially if you are taking a degree in physics. In this note I explain how to find the vector potential, the concept of a gauge transformation and it’s fundamental equations relating it to currents in both electrostatics and electrodynamics. Read more here:

* Image found at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:VFPt_dipole_magnetic3.svg / CC BY-SA 3.0

Keep up to date with the latest messages

Even though we’ve tried to keep the blog as updated as possible with the latest messages from the course pages, there have been a few that has slipped through our radar. To avoid this, we’ve added an automatically updated list to the front page of this website:

mindseye.no/fys1120

Under the heading “Latest messages” you’ll find the three latest messages that has been posted, and by clicking the link you’ll find all messages ever posted on the course pages. So keep an eye on this list in addition to the blog. Not all messages here will be posted in the blog from now on.

For instance, the following messages have not been posted here yet, and might be useful:

  • The second try for the oblig is due 21 October.
  • The obligs have not yet been corrected, but will be some time during this week.
  • About fifty percent of the responses will need to be handed in again.