An inexpensive XRF lab for undergraduates and other educational activities at tarleton's nuclear laboratory

摘要

Since 2001, Tarleton State University's nuclear laboratory has been providing educational labs and research activities to support both physics and non-physics majors. Using Internet based multichannel analyzers, the lab supports not only Tarleton students, but also undergraduates at six other Texas institutions in the Texas Physics Consortium (TPC) of which Tarleton is a founding member. A discussion of the facility, various undergraduate activities, and the laboratory's K-12 outreach activities will be presented. Among those activities to be discussed is the development of an XRF (x-ray fluorescence lab) lab to measure the charge on an electron that can be performed by high schools or undergraduate institutions without x-ray machines or non-exempt radioactive sources and its use in our high school summer physics camp.