Microscope Project for Undergraduate Laboratories

Optics is an important subfield of physics required for instrument design and used in a variety of other disciplines, including materials science, physics, and life sciences such as developmental biology and cell biology. It is important to educate students from a variety of disciplines and backgrounds in the basics of optics in order to train the next generation of interdisciplinary researchers and instrumentalists who will push the boundaries of discovery. In this paper, we present an experimental system developed to teach students in the basics of geometric optics, including ray and wave optics. The students learn these concepts through designing, building, and testing a home-built light microscope made from component parts. We describe the experimental equipment and basic measurements students can perform to learn principles, technique, accuracy, and resolution of measurement. Students find the magnification and test the resolution of the microscope system they build. The system is open and versatile to allow advanced building projects, such as epi-fluorescence, total internal reflection fluorescence, and optical trapping. We have used this equipment in an optics course, an advanced laboratory course, and graduate-level training modules.

• Publication year

  2016

• Venue

  arXiv: Physics Education

• Publication date

  2016-06-07

• Fields of study

  Biology, Materials Science, Physics, Mathematics, Engineering

• Identifiers
  arXiv 1606.03052
• External record

  Open on Semantic Scholar

• Source metadata

  Semantic Scholar

• No claims are published for this paper.

• No concepts are published for this paper.

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