Need project ideas on quantum physics

Wallow

Hi, everyone. I'm not sure if this is the right forum as this isn't a simple question-and-answer homework assignment, so please excuse me if this isn't in the right place. I posted this in a different forum earlier and I think it got deleted, so apologies for the double posting.

I'm a high school senior in an advanced class, and for fourth quarter we are doing independent projects. I chose quantum physics as my area of interest, which I sort of regret now... But I've been researching it all year, so it's too late now.

I need to spend a total of 80 hours on this project. It doesn't need to be one thing; it can be multiple projects. I had originally intended to build a particle accelerator, but have had to abandon it because I cannot find a way to generate a vacuum light enough. Now I'm stuck on ideas. I'm currently doing an experiment with an electron tube to determine the mass of an electron, but that won't take 80 hours and the rest of my project needs to be a bit more original than that.

Ideally it would be something with an independent variable that I could adjust and do multiple trials. I could get away with something that doesn't directly relate to quantum physics per se, so long as it could somehow be included in that umbrella. I've thought about diffraction experiments, but I can't think of anything other than a simple double-slit experiment.

Please, does anyone have any ideas? I would be eternally grateful.

tiny-tim

Hi Wallow! Welcome to PF!

How about something to do with semi-conductors (messing about with transistors, perhaps)?

alienmom

I am fairly new. I need someone to point out what is wrong with the theory of using anti-matter to propel a ship in space. I suppose I should not have started with this since I have been out of school for a while. Parkin developed the idea of microwave thermal propulsion in 2001 and described a laboratory prototype in his 2006 Ph.D. Sending a spacecraft to a moon of Jupiter, for instance, would require a laser that gives billions of watts of power. “You’d have to have another couple generations of space-based telescopes to do something like that,” Kare says. “You can in fact launch an interstellar probe that way but now you’re talking about lasers that might be hundreds of billions of Watts of power.” Laser technology could reach those levels in another 50 years, he says. (Laser Weekly). Now if you take anti-matter and matter and smash together could you not create combustion to propel a ship? Maybe I'm out of my league. It's a theory. Thanks