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

• Lab 1 – Electromagnets and electromotors (Updated October 31, 2012)
• Lab 2 – Hall effect and superconductivity (Updated October 31, 2012)
• Lab 3 – Magnetism and induction

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!

Welcome to the FYS1120 course, where we will guide you through the main topics of electromagnetism. To prepare you for the coming weeks, we’re starting out building your tool box with most of the mathematical background you’ll need in this course.

Every week we’re posting a post like this with exercises and some information about this week’s topic. We’re also sometimes including a zip file containing the Python scripts you’ll need to perform this week’s numerical and visualization exercises.

Knowledge about vectors and vector fields are important in the study of electromagnetism, as well as knowing how to analyze them. We’ll encounter concepts such as flux, divergence and curl which might not be familiar to all of you, but are essential to our exploration of electromagnetic phenomena. Three notes have been written as an introduction to these concepts and to prepare you for this week’s problem set:

• Note 1 – Essentials of Vector Calculus
• Note 2 – Flux and Divergence
• Note 3 – Line integrals and Curl

This year we have chosen to use Python and Mayavi as core tools in this course, so you will also need to learn how to install and use these tools. Therefore, we’ve written a note on how to install Python and Mayavi and a note on how to use them:

• Installing Python and Mayavi
• Python and Mayavi for Electromagnetism

While the problem set itself is found here:

• Mathematical warm-up
• Mathematical warm-up (with answers)

We will also post exercises for week 1 later this week, so it is very important that you start on the mathematical warm-up set, as soon as possible.

If you wonder about anything regarding the notes or this week’s exercises, do not hesitate to ask! We’ll gladly help you out. Good luck!