SACE Stage 2 Physics case studies
SACE Stage 2 Physics · Put your knowledge to work in context.
SACE Stage 2 Physics is the final-year physics subject within the South Australian Certificate of Education, a senior secondary qualification delivered by the SACE Board of South Australia and also offered internationally through SACE International. It suits students in their final year of schooling who are building a science pathway toward university or employment, and who want a mathematically grounded understanding of how the physical world behaves. The SACE Stage 2 Physics case studies are 5 cases and about 1,862 words.
1Relativistic Delivery Drone
A cargo drone travelling at 0.80c relative to a ground station carries a clock and a 2.0 m long antenna aligned along its direction of motion. Mission control on the ground measures the drone passing between two markers that are 120 m apart in the ground frame, and a ground clock records the transit.
417 words, about 2 min2Parallel-Plate Capacitor with a Leaky Dielectric
A parallel-plate capacitor has plates of area 0.050 m² separated by 2.0 mm, connected to a 12 V battery. A dielectric slab with relative permittivity 4.0 is inserted, filling the gap.
355 words, about 2 min3Diffraction Grating with Overlapping Orders
A student uses a diffraction grating with 600 lines per millimetre and a red laser of wavelength 632.8 nm. A screen is placed 1.50 m away.
352 words, about 2 min4Half-Life with a Contaminated Sample
A medical physics technician receives a sample labelled as containing a radioisotope with a half-life of 6.0 hours, to be used in a tracer study. A Geiger counter measures an initial count rate of 4800 counts per minute.
326 words, about 2 min5Magnetic Braking of a Falling Magnet
A strong neodymium magnet is dropped through a vertical copper tube of length 1.2 m. The magnet reaches a terminal velocity well before the bottom, taking 3.5 s to fall the full length, compared with 0.49 s in free fall.
412 words, about 2 min