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Class Problems1

This document contains descriptions of 4 exercises involving writing programs to calculate physics problems: 1) A program to calculate the height of a ball above the ground given the time since it was dropped from a tower. 2) A program to calculate the altitude a satellite must orbit to complete an orbit every given number of seconds. 3) A program to convert Cartesian to polar coordinates for a 2D point. 4) A series of programs to calculate nuclear binding energies using the semi-empirical mass formula, finding the most stable nucleus for a given atomic number.

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Arima Chatterjee
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155 views

Class Problems1

This document contains descriptions of 4 exercises involving writing programs to calculate physics problems: 1) A program to calculate the height of a ball above the ground given the time since it was dropped from a tower. 2) A program to calculate the altitude a satellite must orbit to complete an orbit every given number of seconds. 3) A program to convert Cartesian to polar coordinates for a 2D point. 4) A series of programs to calculate nuclear binding energies using the semi-empirical mass formula, finding the most stable nucleus for a given atomic number.

Uploaded by

Arima Chatterjee
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
Available Formats
Download as PDF, TXT or read online on Scribd
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Exercise 1.

1: Ball dropped from a tower


A ball is dropped from a tower of height h with initial velocity zero. Write a program that asks the user
to enter the time in seconds and then calculate and write the height of the ball above ground, ignoring
air resistance. Use your program to calculate the time for a ball dropped from a 100 m high tower.

Exercise 1.2: Altitude of a satellite


A satellite is to be launched into a circular orbit around the Earth so that it orbits the planet once every T
seconds.

a) Show that the altitude h above the Earths surface that the satellite must have is
1/3
GMT 2

h= R,
4 2

where G = 6.67 1011 m3 kg1 s2 is Newtons gravitational constant, M = 5.97 1024 kg is the
mass of the Earth, and R = 6371 km is its radius.
b) Write a program that asks the user to enter the desired value of T and then calculates and prints
out the correct altitude in meters.
c) Use your program to calculate the altitudes of satellites that orbit the Earth once a day (so-called
geosynchronous orbit), once every 90 minutes, and once every 45 minutes. What do you con-
clude from the last of these calculations?
d) Technically a geosynchronous satellite is one that orbits the Earth once per sidereal day, which is
23.93 hours, not 24 hours. Why is this? And how much difference will it make to the altitude of
the satellite?

Exercise 1.3: Write a program to perform the following operation: ask the user for the Cartesian co-
ordinates x, y of a point in two-dimensional space, and calculate and print the corresponding polar
coordinates, with the angle given in degrees.

Exercise 1.4: The semi-empirical mass formula


In nuclear physics, the semi-empirical mass formula is a formula for calculating the approximate nuclear
binding energy B of an atomic nucleus with atomic number Z and mass number A:

Z2 ( A 2Z )2 a5
B = a1 A a2 A2/3 a3 a 4 + 1/2 ,
A1/3 A A
where, in units of millions of electron volts, the constants are a1 = 15.8, a2 = 18.3, a3 = 0.714, a4 = 23.2,
and
0 if A is odd,
a5 = 12.0 if A and Z are both even,
12.0 if A is even and Z is odd.

a) Write a program that takes as its input the values of A and Z, and prints out the binding energy
for the corresponding atom. Use your program to find the binding energy of an atom with A = 58
and Z = 28. (Hint: The correct answer is around 490 MeV.)

1
b) Modify your program to print out not the total binding energy B, but the binding energy per
nucleon, which is B/A.
c) Now modify your program so that it takes as input just a single value of the atomic number Z
and then goes through all values of A from A = Z to A = 3Z, to find the one that has the largest
binding energy per nucleon. This is the most stable nucleus with the given atomic number. Have
your program print out the value of A for this most stable nucleus and the value of the binding
energy per nucleon.
d) Modify your program again so that, instead of taking Z as input, it runs through all values of Z
from 1 to 100 and prints out the most stable value of A for each one. At what value of Z does the
maximum binding energy per nucleon occur? (The true answer, in real life, is Z = 28, which is
nickel. You should find that the semi-empirical mass formula gets the answer roughly right, but
not exactly.)

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