A simple yet in-depth experiment to measure cosmic ray muons with an inexpensive, hand-held device, the Cosmic Watch. Primary cosmic rays, often streaming thousands of light-years across the galaxy, create an airshower upon hitting Earth's atmosphere, which can now be measured in the lab and classroom with a simple handheld detector.  In this presentation, we demonstrate the diverse capabilities of this amazing device for an incredible array of experiments.

The Fourth Conference on Laboratory Instruction Beyond the First Year of Physics (BFY4), which took place in Chico, CA, prior to the 2023 AAPT Summer Meeting, highlighted laboratory experiences that help students develop skills that they can transfer to graduate school and the STEM workforce. This conference was centered on hands-on workshop experiences designed to introduce instructors to new laboratory experiences that they incorporate in their labs, but also provided plenary talks, breakout sessions, poster sessions, and an advanced lab demo show. Networking opportunities allowed for dialog and community building with the hope that discussions started during BFY4 would continue beyond the conference. This talk will provide an overview of the conference and of the post-conference survey results.

At IWU, we teach an introductory sophomore/junior level course titled Fundamentals of Quantum Information Science. We have recently acquired a number of commercially available Quantum Control (QC) stations from TeachSpin, and are in the middle of designing, debugging and creating documentation for a laboratory component to accompany this course when it is offered next Fall. These QC instruments are compact and moderately priced tabletop NMR experiments that lend themselves to be adapted to the vocabulary and concepts that are now standard in QIS. Our early experience with these QC instruments suggests that we will be able to design a complement of six experiments that explore the following concepts: single qubit states, Unitary quantum gates (X,H, Z and P), measurement in the computational basis, longitudinal and transverse correlation times, the Bloch Sphere and the Bloch Ball. We will report the status of our work in progress.

Robert Millikan’s classic experiment for determining the elementary charge is infamous to generations of undergraduates who have left the laboratory, eyes aching, with a newfound appreciation for the suffering of their predecessors. Could this lab be reconfigured to be less tedious? I have tried to retool the oil drop experiment as a video analysis lab – with mixed results. In theory, one might shift student efforts from time observing droplets toward time analyzing videos, given the ability of programs like Tracker to follow multiple particles in a single frame. In practice, though, the lab remains frustrating.