Final Term Paper
Each student is required to write a research paper and present it, near the end of the semester, to the class for 35 minutes, including discussions. The written reports are officially due in my office the week before the end of the term. If you have extraordinary difficulty, you are urged to arrange with me individually as soon as possible. I will be available for appointments to help you with your research papers throughout the semester.
By the end of October you should have all selected a Physics topic for your final term paper on "How to establish a new important piece of Physics". Possible topics include, but are not limited to:
You should aim at improving the current limits by one order of magnitude on paper. Do discuss with me on how to carry out such an experiment, since I can help you a lot. Topics such as CP violation and b-physics may be excluded, if they are reserved for 8.881, Selected Topics in Experimental Particle Physics. In general, you should avoid using the same topics as 8.881.
These sections must be included in this final written term paper:
1. The significance of this Physics and what has been achieved so far.
2. How would you propose to do it: the source, the detector and the method?
3. Define the signal. How to select the signal?
4. Define the background. How to suppress the background?
5. Compute the signal to noise ratio to show what you propose is plausible.
6. Error (statistical) analysis and discussions.
