Below is a list of ideas for projects. Feel free to bring in your own ideas for final projects. In addition, students have also taken existing labs and extended them in some way such as using an optical chopper and lock-in amplifier to obtain better results from hydrogen spectroscopy. Many of the labs even have suggestions for projects at the end of the write-ups.
Laser ranging
Optical trapping of colloidal particles (laser tweezers)
Fabry-Perot interferometer (to measure Zeeman effect)
Nitrogen laser
Johnson and shot noise measurements from resistors
Zeeman and Stark effect using Doppler-free spectroscopy
Measurement of Raman spectrum
Atomic Force Microscope
Measurement of gravitational constant G
Optical coherent diffractive imaging (imaging via diffraction patterns)
Optical microphone to measure properties of a material (like Young’s modulus)
Investigation of superconductivity
Investigation of High temperature superconductivity
Measurement of specific heat of materials
Measurement of the speed of light “c”
Photoelectric effect and measurement of Planks constant
Modeling quantum effects using optical light and polarizers
Radio telescope
Rutherford scattering of alpha particles
Vibrational modes of a thin metal plate
Energy loss of charged particles in matter
Hall effect
Ultrasonic motion detector
Quantum number generator
Schlieren Imaging