Course Schedule: Physics

Semester Two - Focus on the Atom

Week One: Models of the atom

• Early ideas about the nature of matter
• Early models for the atom
• Rutherford's Experiments and the "Plum Pudding" model
• The Bohr model
• Why the animation above is a BAD model for the atom

Week Two: The quantum nature of light

• Einstein's photoelectric effect
• Quantization of energy
• Wave nature of light
• Wave-particle duality

Week Three: Quantum theory

• Energy quantization
• Operators and Energy
• The meaning of the Hamiltonian
• Wave functions
• Does God play dice?

Week Four: Atomic Physics

• Energy levels in an atom
• Allowed and disallowed transitions
• Absorption spectra
• Emission spectra
• Yellow street lights and the sodium D-lines

Week Five: Laser Physics I

• Balmer lines
• Optical transitions
• Inversion and Optical gain
• Feedback and laser action

Week Six: Laser Physics II

• The nature of laser light
• Types of laser
• Optical pumping in gas lasers
• Solid State lasers, Chemical lasers and other methods for creating inversion
• Electrical pumping - LEDs and diode lasers

Weeks Seven and Eight: Project One - details to be announced by week six!

Week Nine: Optics I

• Wave propagation
• Electromagnetic radiation
• The electromagnetic spectrum
• Refractive index of optical media

Week Ten: Optics II

• Lenses
• Refraction of light
• Diffraction of light

Week Eleven: E=mc² and Nuclear fission / fusion

• Energy and mass
• Rest mass
• Stable and unstable nuclei

Week Twelve: Inside the nucleus

• Protons and neutrons
• The strong force
• Quantum tunneling

Week Thirteen: Inside the nucleons

• Quarks and Gluons
• Quantum Electro-dynamics (QED)
• Color, flavor and the Strange-ness of quarks

Week Fourteen: String Theory, Branes and Grand Unification

• Current ideas in Cosmology
• The "unification" problem
• Cutting edge theoretical models of the "multiverse"

Weeks Fifteen through Seventeen: Project 2

Week Eighteen: POLs