Universitäts-Sternwarte München

Fakultät für Physik der Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität

How the lab course works

1. The course organizer groups the participants into teams of usually two to three students for each experiment. In rare cases smaller or larger groups may become necessary for organizational reasons.
2. Supervised lab work takes place every Tuesday afternoon from 13:30 until 18:00. All members of each team must be present on every of these afternoons, physically and mentally. Each experiment must be prepared and executed by all participants as a team.

   If you cannot attend a lab due to illness, please inform your lab supervisor in time (via e-mail or phone) and hand in a medical certificate. If only one person from the team is ill, this does not mean that the lab will be postponed for the other members as well! The supervisor will make another appointment with the absent student, in order for that student to catch up on the missed work.

3. Each team has to do six experiments. The experiments are assigned to the teams, they cannot be chosen by the team members. The assignments will be posted to the course web page.
4. Each experiment lasts 3 weeks, with the last week of the experiment overlapping with the first week of the following experiment, according to the following schedule:
   

   First week:	Read the lab instruction manual and answer/solve any questions/problems contained therein.
   First lab afternoon:	Discuss the lab subject with the supervisor and perform the first part of the lab work. The lab supervisor may administer a small test to verify that you are adequately prepared in order for the lab work to be meaningful.
   Second week:	Analyze the results of the first lab afternoon, prepare for the second lab afternoon.
   Second lab afternoon:	Continue discussing the lab content with the supervisor, perform the rest of the lab work.
   Third week:	Analyze the lab results and write up the lab report. In parallel, prepare for the next lab.

5. The lab report should be written by the whole group as a team and conform to the lab report guidelines described below. All group members must certify by signing the lab report that they are familiar with its contents and agree with it.

Lab report guidelines

1. Ask your lab supervisors whether they have any specific requirements for the lab report. Use the points below as a general guideline when they don’t conflict with the supervisor’s suggestions.
2. Don’t separate your lab report into a “theory” section and a “results” section. Instead, begin with a brief motivation (about half a page) describing what can be learned from this lab and how it fits into the astrophysical context, and then immediately begin with your lab work analysis. Do not write a lengthy theory section.
3. For each step of the lab work, describe what you did in your own words, and (if applicable) what your measurement results are. Don’t waste your time by copying extensively from the lab manual or writing fancy introductions. Then describe step-by-step the analysis of the data.
4. For each step in the analysis part, briefly describe what this step entails, what quantities are needed, and what assumptions are made. (In effect, discuss any theoretical considerations in individual steps at the place where they are being applied. You may refer to the lab manual if expedient.)
5. Write down each equation where it is being used for the first time, and explain what it describes and what the quantities contained therein are (unless this is already clear from the previous context). The purpose of this is a) that you become better acquainted with what the equations mean physically (as opposed to just how they are derived mathematically) and b) that the supervisors don’t always have to skip back several pages to recall what “equation n” refers to.
6. Most importantly, document all intermediate steps with their values, so that we can give partial credit for the steps performed even if one of the values being used is wrong (perhaps as a consequence of a mistake in an earlier step). Don’t just give the final values.
7. Supplement each step of the analysis with graphs, tabular data, etc. if this aids in presenting the results of that step.
8. As usual, consider errors/uncertainties/confidence-ranges where applicable, make sure units are consistent, check that plots are correctly labeled, etc.
9. Interpret your results in the context of what you know about the subject.
10. End with a brief summary and conclusion (if appropriate).
11. When making plots, be sure to generate scalable graphics (PDF, Postscript, SVG) and not bitmap graphics (PNG, GIF, JPEG).
12. When citing material from the instruction manual, it is usually sufficient (ask your supervisor) to refer to this simply as “the lab manual”. All other sources must be cited according to established scholarly conventions.

Can I use AI for writing the lab report?

Slightly longer version: you are responsible for the content of your lab report. If you don’t understand the subject well enough to write the lab report without the use of AI tools, it is very unlikely that you will recognize errors, inconsistencies, or other wrong claims made by these tools. (Also: any claims not directly supported by your own data or described in the lab manual must be properly cited.)

Therefore: if there is something you do not understand: 1) discuss the matter within the group, then 2) ask your lab supervisor for a meeting to discuss the subject.