In this experiment, a Lamb Dip apparatus was used to detect the hyperfine structure of the rubidium atom. The absorption spectrum that was generated contained four main peaks, each one representing a transition of the ground state hyperfine structure. Each of the four main peaks contained up to three smaller peaks which represented the hyperfine splitting of energy levels. The frequnecy differences between these peaks in the spectrum told us the frequency difference between the energy levels in the energy splitting digram for Rb. We could compare these frequency differences to reported frequency differences of the energy diagram for the rubidium atom. The experimental results showed good agreement with the published values of the frequency differences in most cases.

Sources of error for this experiment include the averaging of data to generate the graphs. For each point on each graph six or more data points were averaged together to calculate the point that was actually graphed. While this made the graphs smoother, the accuracy of the peaks was diminshed. The limitations of the equipment, especially the Pasco computer software used to generate the spectra graphs, dimished the definition of the peaks for the excited state hyperfine structure. This fact along with the overlap of closely spaced peaks made it difficult to accurately identify all the peaks for the excited state hyperfine structure.

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