AAPT Workshop, Brownian Motion to Diffusion Random Walks in Introductory Physics
Mark Reeves, George Washington University



Description
Distributed files
Materials
Other curricular elements
Ponderables
Random walk simulation
Lab: Brownian Motion
Lab: diffusion in gels
Sample Class plans
FAQs

Materials List

The following is the list of materials needed for the two labs described in the workshop

  1. Brownian Motion Lab
    1. Optical microscope with x10 and x40 objectives
    2. Levy chamber, allows beads to be imaged while reducing convection due to evaporation.
    3. 3 micron polystyrene beads
    4. Low light, B/W camera PC164CEX or equivalent
    5. Microscope eyepiece to camera adapter
    6. computer equipped with frame grabber and image acquisition software virtualdub, (pc) or macam (mac) or loggerpro
    7. image modification software virtualdub, (pc) or ISquint (mac)
    8. ImageJ software with bead find plugin.
  2. Diffusion Lab
    1. Gel agarose mixed to 1% by weight with water, fisher part #BP2466500
    2. Plastic pipette
    3. 95 x 15 mm petri dishes fisher part #0875714G
    4. bromophenol blue fisher part #AC4031400
    5. 30 microliter pipetter
    6. Gagne porta-trace lightbox
    7. Home-made light shroud from optical quality darkening material
    8. Digital camera
    9. computer equipped with ImageJ

Sponsored by NSF-DUE, CCLI Program