Some weird experiment in the Physice Lab. Don't know who the boy is here? Photo from David Wardell.
Says Phil Payne: It's a spectroscopy experiment. The school had just bought a 14,000lpi diffraction grating - it was affordable because it wasn't diamond ruled as they had been before, but made via some kind of moulding process. That's the school's sodium lamp. We did the experiment and then moved all the kit into the darkroom where Prof and I tried to see if we could 'split' the main sodium line - it's supposed to be two lines very close together, the different being the direction of electron spin. I now know you need a magnet to do that.
Says Phil Payne: It's a spectroscopy experiment. The school had just bought a 14,000lpi diffraction grating - it was affordable because it wasn't diamond ruled as they had been before, but made via some kind of moulding process. That's the school's sodium lamp. We did the experiment and then moved all the kit into the darkroom where Prof and I tried to see if we could 'split' the main sodium line - it's supposed to be two lines very close together, the different being the direction of electron spin. I now know you need a magnet to do that.