# Summary of the Balmer Lab

SJK 18:28, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
18:28, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
This is the correct kind of summary--good length and talking about the correct things. Numerical uncertainty (mean +/- s.e.m.) will be essential in future labs, which is missing here. Also, there isn't discussion of why there would be a difference in deuterium versus hydrogen...and then whether it is something you should be able to detect with your instrument.

The main goal of the Blamer Lab was to measure the wavelength of the emitted light when you were to excite hydrogen gas to different excited states. Once you measured these wavelength's you could then calculate the Rydberg Constant, which was the goal for the experiment. I did this with the use of a hydrogen tube that was excited via the use of electricity and a spectroscope to measure the wavelength's of the emitted photons.

The value I obtained for the Rydberg Constant is $R_{av}=1.09656147\times 10^7\times m^{-1}$ it was only .00965% off the accepted value. So i would say that there was not too much error in collecting the data and that the error's were minimal. SJK 18:20, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
18:20, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
What you have here is a final value and a discussion of discrepancy (difference from accepted value). However, in order to fully evaluate this discrepancy, you need to compare with the uncertainty on your final value (which you don't report here).
SJK 18:32, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
18:32, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
What is the accepted value and where are you obtaining it?

The underlying quantum physics in the hydrogen spectrum is the allowable energy states that the excited electrons are able to occupy and the resulting emitted photons of certain energy levels. So there can only be certain values for the emitted wavelengths of light from the exited hydrogen gas. For the deuterium energy levels i was supposed to find that the wavelengths were shifted due to the heaver nucleus of the deuterium atom but the results were too varied for me to conclude anything from the data the error in the average was $R_{Deuterium}=1.0324515\times 10^{7}m^{-1}$ and the error was 5.86% but i do not trust that data so i will not speculate to guess what this data means.

Most of the data taken would point to the fact that the spectroscope is a pretty precise intstrument. If i had more data i could probably get more precision on the Rydberg Constant, which would say that it is a good way to obtain one of the physical constants. I could not say if the same could be done for deuterium due to the fact that my data was not all that precise and that there seemed to be errors in either me reading the instrumentation wrong or calibrating the equipment incorrectly, either one i could not with complete certainty say.SJK 18:23, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
18:23, 4 October 2009 (EDT)
Actually, looks like you had a typo which threw off your average.