Modern Physics Laboratory (33.340)
Software

The following downloadable files are Excel spreadsheets with macros which have been found useful by Modern Physics Lab students. We think they are pretty good, but there is no warranty whatsoever with these macros. Caveat Emptor. Depending on the operating system and the degree of full macro support, there are differences in performance across platforms. Other software: To run the VPython-based simulations, your computer must have python and VPython installed. This is easy to do (and free) if you go to http://vpython.org and follow the instructions.
  • NucMagRes.py: Download.

    Simulation of Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (NMR) physics using the "VPython" environment. See directly what the relaxation times T1 and T2 and T2* really mean. The time evolution of the expectation value of the quantum mechanical spin operator is the same as the evolution of a classical spinning magnetic moment. Therefore this visualization is valid and can be very instructive.

  • EMWave.py: Download.

    Simulation of polarized electromagentic waves using the "VPython" environment. Simulate two plane-polarized waves that are 90 degrees out of phase with each other and also oriented 90 degrees apart. When they are simultaneously present, one sees the true meaning of the notion of circular polarization.

  • OpticalPumping.py: Download.

    Simulation of optical pumping using the "VPython" environment. A collection of Rubidium-87 atoms are subjected to ciruclarly polarized light which progressively pushes them to higher values of magnetic sub-state values. A transverse RF magnetic field precesses the spin vectors collectively, illustrating how the optically pumped state is destroyed by repopulating the other magnetic sub-states of the system.

  • mpl_chaos_duffing: Download.

    Maple work sheet for the Chaos experiment. Simulates the Duffing oscillator used in the experiment. See the Chaos handout for instructions.

  • mpl_chaos_boxcounting: Download.

    Excel spreadsheet for computing fractal dimension using a box counting algorithm. See the Chaos handout for instructions.


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Last updated on 1/14/20mm by schumacher@cmu.edu.