REU Homepage for Daniel Koury


(My page isn't under construction. This is the kind of work I really did for the summer of '97!)


This is my Physics Page. I have posted at last a brief description of some of my research this summer. See it below.


About me:

        My name is Daniel Koury. I attend Florida Southern College and I am preparing to enter my senior year. I am presently getting experience working in the research environment. I work for Dr. John Farley at the University of Nevada Las Vegas (UNLV). The program I am in is called REU (Research Experience for Undergraduates). Find out more about it and check out my colleages pages!

Also, see my home page to learn more about me.

My REU project consists of working on an old experiment that was prematurely ended. The apparatus is part of a velocity-modulated ion spectroscopy experiment. In my project no laser was used.  My project involved making spectroscopic investigations of excited Helium.   A power source was used to run an electric current through a water-cooled discharge tube.  The power was set at approximately 400 watts and the source was running an A/C current at 25 kHz. The light from the Helium was caught in a Czerny-Turner monochromator and passed, incrementally by wavelength, to a photodetector.  The photodetector was connected to a lock-in amplifier.  The lock-in uses a
reference signal, in this case the 25 kHz from the power source, to filter out noise from the photodetector voltage signal.  The lock-in reduces noise by identifying tiny changes in the signal that occur at the refererence frequency.  The tiny changes occuring at the reference frequency is the desired signal.  A lock-in amplifier is a powerful instrument that is capable of singling out a signal with a bandwidth of several hundred nV.
          The monochromator scans through the entire spectrum, passing a smallband of wavelengths at a time.  The photodetector picks up the intensity of the light and sends a relative voltage to the lock-in.  The scans were monitored and saved to a data file by a program that I wrote with graduate student, Steve Mitchell, and post-doc, Dr. Jack Glassman.  The program uses a GPIB (General Purpose Interface Bus) connection to the lock-in and it uses standard GPIB commands. The program is an efficient means by which to store data and settings on the lock-in for a given data collection.


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