Lab schedule

For your reference:

UGrad research conference

RESEARCH AND CREATIVE ACTIVITY CONFERENCE APPLICATIONS — Faculty are requested to remind undergraduate students of all majors that they are invited to enter UA’s annual Undergraduate Research and Creative Activity Conference scheduled for April 11 at the Bryant Conference Center. Students can compete for cash prizes and earn practical experience in defending or performing their work before judges. To participate, undergraduate students must register their projects by submitting application forms and abstracts describing their projects by March 7. Visit http://www.osp.ua.edu/UndergradResearch.html for an application and details.

PH253 last lecture: computer logic & memories

It seems flash/ram/etc has won the day, so my last lecture of the semester will be on computer architecture, logic, and memory from a physics-y point of view. Invite your friends ;-)

The rough plan will be this:

• What is our current high-level computer architecture?
• How does one make memory/logic? What components are required? How do they work?
• How do we currently build logic and memory?
• How do (s/d)-ram and flash memories work?
• What are the future prospects/promising new technologies?
• Is Moore's "law" really in trouble? (Spoiler: it is not a law, and not yet.)

I think this will make a nice consistent logical flow, and all these topics are accessible with the physics we've covered. Time permitting, I would add:

• A brief overview of how hard disks work
• A brief overview of how mram might work (spoiler: it isn't ready yet)
• Energy requirements/limitations for computation

This last lecture will be mostly 'show & tell' via powerpoint - almost no equations, mostly descriptive, but we've covered all the physics you need to understand these things. None of it will be on the final exam (neither will the material on LASERs from today).

PH253: last lecture

We have two lectures left. One is Nov 30, when we'll finish our discussion of particle statistics and figure out how lasers work. The second is Dec 3, our last class meeting.

I have not decided what I would prefer to do on Dec 3 myself yet, but as promised I'm open to any (reasonable and physics-related) suggestions for topics. Anything at least tangentially-related to the material we've covered I'm willing to give a lecture on. You can email your suggestions, or leave comments here, but just about anything goes. I will indicate if I think the topic you suggest is inappropriate or too detailed to explain clearly in one class.

My own suggestions, in no particular order:

• more on transistors & semiconductor electronics
• information storage technologies (hard disks, ram, flash, etc.)
• two-level systems & resonance
• applications of particle statistics (chemical kinetics, diffusion, etc)
• crystals, geometry, & diffraction
• magnetic materials

Don't feel confined by this list of topics, they are just a few things I would have liked to have covered if there were more time.

HW7 solutions / HW8 due date

HW7 solutions are out. This time, we heavily abuse Wolfram Alpha to avoid a great deal of tedium.

HW8 is due tomorrow, Nov 2. I did not note the time that it was due, but it is the usual 11:59pm ... so you have about 25 hours to go yet.

Good thing, since apparently many of you are affected by a power outage at the moment ...

PH253: Exam 2

Exam 2 is this Thursday, Nov. 4 during the normal class period. The rules are basically the same as last time:

• You can bring in one sheet of normal 8.5x11in paper front & back, or two sheets using one side only on each. 
• You will also get a formula sheet with the exam.
• There will be 6 problems, you choose 4 to solve.

The coverage for the exam is, referring to your textbook sections:

• 2.4.4-8, 2.5 Wave functions, Schrodinger, etc.
• 3.2.1 Bohr model
• 3.3 Hydrogen

The relevant homework sets from this semester are HW4-7; additionally HW4-7 from this past spring are relevant (as is exam II and the final exam from this past spring).

I will draw all of the problems problems directly from your homework from this semester and the homework from last semester listed above (though in somewhat abbreviated form).

Study those sections of the text and your notes, look at the HW sets mentioned, and you will be fine. It is extremely unlikely that practice problems will appear.

I will try to post the formula sheet tomorrow (Wed) so you know what you don't need to bother including on your own sheet.

PH253: HW7 is out.

Here you are. Due friday.

Make your own spectrometer / misc

This is awesome. Cell phone spectrometer ...

In other news: I've been unavoidably detained by advising issues the last day or so, but I will be updating Moodle grades, putting out HW6 solutions, and posting HW7 over the weekend. HW7 will not be due until ~Friday next week since I'm delayed in posting it.

Tuesday, we will look at the angular parts of the hydrogen atom solution we ignored so far, and figure out what p, d, and f orbitals are all about. That will run in to Thursday, but by the end of the week we'll have a good understanding of atomic orbitals, ideally.

PH253: Physics help desk

Good news everyone, I've negotiated with the PH10x TAs, and they have agreed that it is OK if you come by the physics help desk for PH253 homework questions.* You can find the help desk hours here. The following TAs explicitly agreed to help with PH253 questions:

Lei Lu, Zachary Burell, Arindam Das, Jason Carson, Chockalingam Sivakumar, Sahar Keshavarz, Christopher Sterpka, Andrea Chaney

I didn't hear back from a few of the TAs when I asked if it was OK for you to come by, but the list above covers most of the available help desk hours. (I said that a lack of response would be construed as a 'yes' on their part though.) I agreed to send them the HW solutions in advance each week so they can better help you.

*Previously, the help desk was only for 100-level physics, but I asked if they would expand their repertoire.

PH253: HW6 is out

Due next Wednesday ...

Also, a nice applet for visualizing wave functions.

PH253: Extra credit possibility

I posted last week that we'll have a special physics lecture Thursday evening. I think it will be really fun, and directly relevant to our course material. So here's the deal

1. You attend the lecture.
2. You write me 1 page (8.5x11 in paper, 1.5 inch margins, 12pt font, single spaced) covering

• One new thing you learned from the lecture
• One way the lecture tied in to PH253
• One way the lecture tied in to your major/field of study
• One way the lecture tied in to everyday life

Do this, and I give you as much as +2% on your overall grade at the end of the semester, depending on quality of your writeup.*

To give you an idea of what 2% means:

• There will be about 10 HW sets. Each is worth about 1% of your grade. This is 2 free HW sets. Typing up a single page should take a minuscule amount of time compared to my HW sets :-)
• Each exam is 30% of your grade, each question on the exam about 6%. This is like adding 3 points to your lowest exam question.

The speaker has a very good blog here, and a highly entertaining and interesting book you might check out.

*If you are a non-native English speaker, this will be taken into account. English grammar and spelling is very silly.

Today's schedule, approximately

I have meetings from about 1-3, so today is a bit less open than I had hoped. Here is when (and where) I'm likely to be available:

11-12:30 Gallalee 110
~3-5:30 Bevill 2012

I'll be reading email regularly this evening for last minute questions as well. I will try to be in Gallalee by about 10:00 tomorrow for any truly last-minute questions.

PH253: EXAM 1 DATE MOVED

Exam 1 has been moved to THURSDAY. It is not on Tuesday. Full stop.

PH253: homework deadline extended

You can turn in HW2 any time up until this coming Tuesday's class, 11am on 7 Sept 2010. I'll be posting more hints over the weekend, and will be around Bevill this afternoon and tomorrow afternoon.

(Also, some typos in the notes came up today, I'll fix them this afternoon/evening and post when it is done.)

PH253: homework 2 hints

Check it. As will be our habit, we'll fully work some of the problems in class, and at least set up the rest. This homework is mathematically challenging in a few places, but I'll try to spend a little extra time on the most difficult spots

(Also, notice that in the notes on radiation I've included some example problems toward the end ...)

Tomorrow, we'll deal with accelerating charges and figure out where radiation comes from. In the notes I've written up, we'll start with 1.2.2 (Charges that start and stop) and try to get as far as the equation of motion for oscillating charges (1.3.5). Thursday, we'll continue from where we left off and finish off the rest.

Again, I will probably skip some of the details in the notes to focus on the most important results. I tried to be as thorough as possible in the notes so you could see how everything we need can be derived from what we already saw in PH105 and PH106.

PH253: notes for the next few lectures

Over the next three lectures, we'll be discussing radiation (light emission) in detail, and in particular the spectrum of light emitted from hot objects ("blackbody radiation"). What we'll find is that the classical description is severely lacking, and this will lead us to the necessary development of quantum physics.

I find the textbook derivations of blackbody radiation mostly obtuse, too rooted in esoteric historical baggage, and unnecessarily difficult. All this annoyed me enough to come up with some notes on radiation that will make up the bulk of the next three lectures. The notes are not quite complete yet (close, probably 'done' by Thursday), and there are a few extra bits included beyond what we'll probably cover in class.

So, 1) don't be scared by the length of the notes, you're not responsible for all of it, 2) they are long because I purposely tried to only use PH105-106 material and relativity, 3) the gain in clarity will be worth the extra time in the end, and 4) I will spell out what material you are responsible for knowing on the exam, and it will mostly be what is in the textbook. The extra derivations are mostly just for clarity, you'll be responsible for the end result.

Anyway, here's the basic plan for the next few lectures.

PH253: Lecture 2

Tuesday's lecture will cover the following:

• Lorentz transformations (relating position, velocity, and time in different frames)
• Space-time diagrams
• Momentum
• Energy
• Force

Last year's scanned notes are here, by the way.

What we'll cover this week is a combination of the PH102 notes linked in the last post and most of what I have in the scanned notes entitled "relativity_L3.pdf." That corresponds to sections 1.3 and 1.5 in your textbook for Tuesday, on Thursday we'll (probably) spend most of the time applying relativity to what we already know of E&M. You can read either the textbook or the notes I'm linking, whatever you find more enlightening ...

PH253: Course schedule

Your course schedule, as a simple spreadsheet, or a Google calendar.

Note before booking any travel arrangements that we have that extra-awesome 8am Friday Dec. 10 final exam slot.

PH253 Fall 2010 Syllabus

Find it here.

Extra-credit exam

For PH253, the aforementioned extra credit exam will give you a maximum 2.5% added on to your grade, scaled by your performance on the exam. It will not be specific to HW or Exam grades, it will simply add to your overall average.