PhyA21: Equipotential Lab Report Guidelines
General notes: This is more of a qualitative lab than quantitative, which means that some of the typical elements of a formal lab report might be a bit different. Nonetheless, there are quantitative measurements involved, and some of the same issues of applying theoretical ideas to the real world will apply as always. A general goal is to make your writing as clear and easy to follow as possible. This also applies to visual information (plots, diagrams, etc.)
You should have already received some guidance from your section leaders during the practical session. Generally you are free to structure things in different ways as long as the result is clear, but here are some suggestions for how you might organize it into sections.
Theory: Here you should summarize the idea of electric potential and equipotential lines, and discuss how these are related to the electric field and to electric field lines in general. You may cite the textbook or other sources that you consult. This can be a couple of short paragraphs or more, as long as the explanation is clear.
Method: In this section, you should describe the setup of the experiment, how you went about making the measurements, and how you inferred information about equipotential lines and electric field lines from those measurements.
Results and Discussion: (This could be two separate sections or they could be merged into one.)
Here you should include copies of the plots you made in your lab notebook. Discuss any important qualitative features that you notice in the plots you have obtained. Further discussion could address some or all of the following questions:
1. How did your results compare with what you expected based on your prior theoretical understanding?
2. Do your results appear to match the symmetries of the electrode geometries you were studying?
3. What were some of the limitations on the experiment, things that had an influence on your ability to plot and visualize the equipotential lines?
4. How confident are you that your plots of equipotentials and electric field lines represent the true situation? Is one of those (equipotentials or filed lines) more certain than the other? What are the assumptions behind each and what might the limits of those assumptions be?
Notes on writing tools: you can use any tools and applications you want in generating the report. You may notice that when it comes to scientific and mathematical content, MS Word can be pretty awkward--- it’s really not optimized for that. In the long run, especially if you continue in physics or a related field, you might find it worth the investment to learn to use LaTeX--- there is a bit of a learning curve, but it is more or less the gold standard when it comes to typesetting for scientific and mathematical writing. There are a number of free and/or open source applications that work as front ends or editors for LaTeX. I frequently use a free application called TexMacs. Despite the name, it is not directly based on either LaTeX or emacs, but it incorporates some LaTeX syntax and is capable of generating LaTeX code.