Lab 9 Error Budgets & Chopping

Julian's Lab 9 data
If you want to add additional data you recorded to this spreadsheet, drop Julian a note (or me and I will forward).

Lab 9 was all about error budgeting an experiment. An error budget not only is a guide to understanding the sources of uncertainty in an experiment once you have data in hand, but it is also a powerful tool in experiment design. Once you know the big contributors, you can spend some effort to make them smaller, improving the overall experiment. Where's Waldo the Error Budget in this picture?

In experiment 9, chopping was an important technique in reducing noise introduced by drifts. Here is some chopping in action as Jillian alternately allows a polarized and unpolarized beam to be sensed on the photometer in order to assess the noise introduced by laser polarization and intensity drifts.