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Industrial applications of plasma have significantly increased beyond semiconductor manufacturing in recent years. This necessitates training a skilled workforce in plasma science and technology. However, an essential challenge to this end…
In this paper, we demonstrate a low-cost method to measure the speed of light. It uses instruments which are readily available in any undergraduate laboratory in a developing country and some components which are inexpensive. The method is…
Photoacoustic Computed Tomography (PACT) is a major configuration of photoacoustic imaging, a hybrid noninvasive modality for both functional and molecular imaging. PACT has rapidly gained importance in the field of biomedical imaging due…
A simple strobe setup with potential to study higher-order eigenmodes and multifrequency oscillations in micromechanical resonators is described. It requires standard equipment, commonly found in many laboratories, and it can thus be…
We demonstrate a simple and cost-efficient scanning confocal microscope setup for use in advanced instructional physics laboratories. The setup is constructed from readily available commercial products, and the implementation of a…
A system using a personal computer, speaker, and a microphone is used to detect objects, and make crude measurements using a carrier modulated by a pseudorandom noise (PN) code. This system can be constructed using a personal computer and…
Single-molecule sensitive microscopies and spectroscopies are transforming biophysics and materials science laboratories. Techniques such as fluorescence correlation spectroscopy (FCS) and single-molecule sensitive fluorescence resonance…
Interactivity, experimenting and performing laboratory practicals contribute much to the efficiency of natural science and engineering education. Computers represent a natural element for today's students, thus the use of computers in…
Submillimeter cameras now have up to $10^4$ pixels (SCUBA 2). The proposed CCAT 25-meter submillimeter telescope will feature a 1 degree field-of-view. Populating the focal plane at 350 microns would require more than $10^6$ photon-noise…
In this paper we discuss the use of sensors incorporated in mobile devices as possible mobile laboratories at the service of teaching experimental sciences. Mobile devices, smartphones, tablets, laptops, microbit cards, are a resource for…
An inexpensive analog-to-digital converter has been built around the game port of the IBM personal computer. Using a single field effect transistor (FET) and three carbon resistors, it allows the game card to measure voltage, instead of its…
Many applications, including medical diagnostics, sonar and navigation rely on the detection of acoustic waves. Photonic hydrophones demonstrate comparable sensitivity to piezoelectric-based hydrophones, but with significantly reduced size,…
Particle physics, when taught in the classroom or lecture theatre, suffers from a lack of practical experience by students. Thus, we describe the construction of a fully working small particle physics detector using state of the art…
Contamination of signals by pickup and interference is a recurrent problem in physics experiments, the suppression of which consumes much time and effort. Techniques are presented which allow the time-domain assessment of mitigation…
In undergraduate optics courses, diffraction gratings are studied extensively, generally within the scalar approximation. When the vector nature of light is taken into account, so-called polarization diffraction gratings have been proposed,…
Simple optical instruments are linear optical networks where the incident light modes are turned into equal numbers of outgoing modes by linear transformations. For example, such instruments are beam splitters, multiports, interferometers,…
A low-cost adjustable illumination scheme for hand-held photoacoustic imaging probe is presented, manufactured and tested in this paper. Compared with traditional photoacoustic probe design, it has the following advantages: (1) Different…
Image sensors are the backbone of many imaging technologies of great importance to modern sciences, being particularly relevant in biomedicine. An ideal image sensor should be usable through all the electromagnetic spectrum (large…
We present several applications of the particle camera MX-10 in different radiation environments, leading to strikingly different observed patterns and consequently particle composition as well as recorded dose. We describe the measurements…
We describe an undergraduate project to build a Duffing oscillator. Although the ultimate goal was to demonstrate chaos, the overriding consideration was cost, as this was during COVID-19, and budgets were frozen. Previous designs used…