Experiment data files from across the physics course — spreadsheets, write-ups, and reports ready to open in Excel or Google Sheets. Use them as templates, for analysis practice, or to check your own results against.
Mechanics & Motion
Usain Bolt 100 m Sprint — World Record Analysis
xlsx
Distance–time and velocity–time data for the 2009 Berlin world record. Good for exploring non-uniform acceleration, instantaneous vs average velocity, and graphical analysis of motion.
Video analysis of a rubber popper toy — captures the launch phase at high frame rate. Useful for energy conservation, impulse, and projectile calculations.
Accelerometer data from a phone placed under a jumping popper. Illustrates how consumer sensors can capture rapid acceleration events and links to Newton's second law.
Datalogger results from an Atwood machine setup. Separates gravitational acceleration from measured cart acceleration to explore F = ma without needing to know g in advance.
Student write-up investigating how load affects extension in a plastic wire, including a graph showing the elastic and plastic regions. Covers Hooke's law, Young modulus, and the limit of proportionality.
Resonance tube data at multiple frequencies. Students determine the speed of sound from the relationship between tube length and wavelength at the fundamental and harmonic frequencies.
Angle of incidence and refraction measurements for a rectangular glass block. Includes a Snell's law analysis and calculation of the refractive index with uncertainty treatment.
Light intensity measured with a photocell at increasing distances from a point source. Demonstrates the inverse square law and includes a log–log plot to confirm the relationship.
Terminal voltage vs. current data for a carbon-zinc 9 V battery. The gradient of the V–I graph gives internal resistance; the y-intercept gives the EMF. A neat, clean dataset for circuit analysis.
Threshold voltage data for LEDs of known wavelength. Plotting eV against frequency gives a straight line whose gradient is h — a real determination of Planck's constant from simple bench equipment.
Full lab report for a calorimetry experiment measuring the specific heat of water and lead. Includes method, error analysis, and a candid discussion of the large systematic errors encountered.
Pressure and volume data for a fixed mass of gas at constant temperature. A p vs 1/V plot confirms the linear relationship and allows students to extract a value for the constant k.
Temperature-vs-time cooling curves for containers with matt black, shiny silver, and white surfaces. Good for comparing emissivity and discussing Stefan's law qualitatively.
Light Absorption as a Model for X-ray / Gamma Absorption
xlsx
Intensity data for visible light passing through increasing thicknesses of absorbing material, used as an analogy for exponential attenuation in medical imaging and nuclear physics.
Simulated decay using dice — each roll removes a fraction of the "nuclei." The resulting data mirrors real exponential decay and gives students intuition for randomness, half-life, and the decay constant.
Binding energy per nucleon data for a range of nuclides. Used to plot the classic binding energy curve, identify the most stable nuclides, and explain energy release in fission and fusion.
Position vs time trace from a datalogger for a mass oscillating on a spring. Covers period, amplitude, SHM analysis, and energy exchange between kinetic and potential forms.
A general student results write-up template with data tables, graph space, and an analysis section — useful as a starting point for any practical report.