| Week of | Monday | Tuesday | Wednesday | Friday |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Jan. 9 | Introduction, overview, light as an em wave, Newtonian relativity | Special relativity postulates, time dilation, length contraction |
Michelson-Morley experiment; twin paradox | Simultaneity, Lorentz transformation, examples |
| Jan. 16 | Holiday | More examples; spacetime and causality | Quiz 1 |
Relativistic momentum,
acceleration, kinetic energy, total and rest energy |
| Jan. 23 |
Momentum and energy conservation; review of relativity |
Fission, fusion | Blackbody radiation, Stefan law, Wien displacement law |
Derivation of Planck's law |
| Jan. 30 | Derivation of Wien and Stefan
laws from Planck's law ; Photoelectric effect |
Quiz 2 | X-rays and Compton effect | Compton effect, Bragg scattering, Faraday electrolysis |
| Feb. 6 | Thomson experiment; Rutherford atom | Spectroscopy; Bohr atom | Bohr atom | Franck-Hertz experiment; de Broglie relations |
| Feb. 13 | Davisson-Germer experiment; wave packets |
Quiz 3 | Phase and group velocity Heisenberg uncertainty relations |
Gaussian wave packet; zero point motion: hydrogen atom, harmonic oscillator |
| Feb. 20 | Holiday |
Probabilistic interpretation of the wave function; double slit experiment |
Schrodinger equation in 1 dimension | Particle in a box |
| Feb. 27 | Finite square well; harmonic oscillator | Quiz 4 | Operators, expectation values, eigenfunctions and eigenvalues |
Barriers, tunneling phenomena; &alpha decay |
| March 6 | Field emission. Quantum mechanics in 3 dimensions, particle in 3D box |
Hydrogen atom | Hydrogen atom | Electron spin |
| March 13 | Atomic structure | Quiz 5 | Periodic table | Review |