Course No:  BSO 203
 QUANTUM  PHYSICS

Session 2002-2003, Semester I
Instructor: S. Raychaudhuri

The purpose of this course is to introduce students to the world of the quantum, from the Old Quantum Theory, through the basics of Wave Mechanics, to modern applications, especially in spectroscopy, condensed matter physics, optics and the physics of elementary particles. The aim is thus to take the students on a tour of twentieth-century physics, with the stress being more on understanding and appreciating the phenomena than on working out the details.

LECTURE  & TUTORIAL  SCHEDULE

    Timing Batch A Batch B Batch C
Monday Lecture 10:00 - 11:00 L-5 L-5 L-5
Tuesday Tutorial 10:00 - 11:00 TB-106 TB-107 TB-108
Wednesday Lecture 10:00 - 11:00 L-1 L-1 L-1
Thursday Tutorial 10:00 - 11:00 TB-106 TB-107 TB-108
Friday Lecture 10:00 - 11:00 L-6 L-6 L-6
      H. Wanare S. Dey S. Raychaudhuri
QUIZZES
 I II III IV V VI VII VIII
PROBLEMS I II III IV V VI VII VII (ans)

LECTURE  CONTENTS

Lecture  No Day & Date Contents
1 Tuesday 
July 30, 2002		 Newton's law of cooling, Stefan-Boltzmann law, Fraunhofer spectrum, Kirchoff's law and explanation of the Fraunhofer spectrum, concept of a blackbody, Fery's black body, blackbody spectrum, Wien's displacement law. Portraits: 
     Isaac Newton          Josef  Stefan          Ludwig Boltzmann
    Josef  Fraunhofer     Gustav Kirchoff
2 Friday
August 2, 2002		 Wien's distribution formula, its failure at the IR end, Rayleigh-Jeans formula, detailed derivation, assuming the Classical Equipartition Theorem.

Portraits: 
     Wilhelm Wien        Lord Rayleigh        Sir James Jeans         Rudolf Clausius
3 Monday
August 5,2002		 Failure of the Rayleigh-Jeans formula, ultraviolet catastrophe, Planck's hypothesis and derivation of Planck's distribution formula, its success. Portraits:
     Otto Lummer         E. Pringsheim          Max Planck
4 Tuesday
August 6,2002		 Einstein's derivation of Planck's distribution,  A, B coefficients, coherence, maser and laser, photoelectric effect, discovery and phenomenology.

Portraits: 
     Albert Einstein        Charles Townes      Philipp Lenard 
5 Friday
August 9,2002		 Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect, Millikan's experiment to confirm this, the Compton effect, Compton's derivation of the change of wavelength. Portraits:
     Robert Millikan          Arthur Compton
6 Monday
August 12,2002		 Discovery of emission spectra, early speculations, measurements of Angstrom and Balmer's formula, Rydberg formula and Ritz combination principle, non-classical nature of line spectra, discovery of electron, atomic models of Thomson, Jeans, Lenard and  Nagaoka. Portraits: 
     Johann Balmer          Janne Rydberg          Walter Ritz         Sir Joseph Thomson         Hantaro Nagaoka 
6 Friday
August 16,2002		 Rutherford's gold-foil experiment, planetary model of the atom,  stability problem, Bohr's theory of hydrogenic atoms, stationary orbits, quantisation condition.

Portraits:
     Lord Rutherford       Niels Bohr
7 Friday
August 23,2002		 Experimental  support for Bohr's theory, homologous series in hydrogen, Pickering series, reduced mass of electron in Rydberg's constant, Franck-Hertz experiment, Moseley's experiments and the importance of atomic number, Sommerfeld's extension of Bohr's theory to elliptic orbits (sketch only), unanswered questions in the Old Quantum Theory. Portraits:
     James Franck        Gustav Hertz         Henry Moseley         Arnold Sommerfeld
8 Saturday
August 24,2002		 Two approaches to quantum mechanics,  de Broglie's hypothesis, matter waves and derivation of Planck's quantisation condition,  wave group and group velocity of de Broglie waves, diffraction from a crystal: Bragg's law, Laue spots and Debye-Scherrer picture, experiments of Davisson and Germer, experiments of G.P. Thomson.

Revision of Fourier series, Fourier integral and Fourier transforms, Dirac delta function and its properties.

Portraits:
     Louis de Broglie 
     Sir W.H.  & Sir W.L. Bragg      Max von Laue     Pieter  Debye
     Sir Clinton Davisson                G.P. Thomson
9  Monday
August 26,2002		 Wave groups and wave profiles, superposition of two waves,  phase velocity and group velocity, truncated wave train as a wave packet, uncertainty relation,  Gaussian wave packet and its Fourier transform, the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle,  dispersion relation for de Broglie waves, spreading of a Gaussian wave packet. Portraits:
    Charles Fourier          Carl Gauss
10 Tuesday
August 27,2002		 Wave equations from the dispersion relation, operator equivalences, `derivation' of Schrödinger equation for a free particle,  Hamiltonian operator,  Schrödinger equation in a potential,  fundamental nature of  Schrödinger equation, Born interpretation of wavefunction, normalisation and square-integrability,  time-independent Schrödinger equation, stationary states, equation of continuity and conservation of probability.

Portraits:
     Erwin Schrödinger
   September 4,
2002		 F I R S T    M I D - S E M E S T E R     E X A M I N A T I O N 

Maximum Marks:  40          Class Average:  18.0         Highest Mark: 31         Lowest Mark:  01


Question paper                       Solution Set

       Performance Histogram         Correlation Plot with Attendance
   
11-16 September
6, 9, 11, 13, 16, 18
2002		 Quantum Theory of Measurement:  Copenhagen interpretation, disturbance induced my measurement process, gamma ray microscope, probability interpretation of wavefunction, role of Schrödinger equation, collapse of wavefunction on measurement, Schrödinger cat paradox, EPR paradox and violation of microcausality, eigenfunctions and eigenvalues, expectation values, Hermitian operators and orthonormal eigenfunctions, completeness hypothesis, probability of collape in terms of overlap integral,  definition of uncertainty in terms of variance, formal statement of Heisenberg uncertainty principle, canonically conjugate and non-conjugate variables, commutativity and simultaneous eigenstates, canonical commutation relations, classical limit and correspondence principle, complementarity principle, postulates of quantum mechanics.
LECTURE  NOTES

Portraits:
    Werner Heisenberg         Max Born                   Pascual Jordan
    Niels Bohr                       Wolfgang Pauli           Paul Dirac
    Einstein, Podolsky & Rosen
     David Hilbert                   Arthur Cayley 
17 Friday
September 20,2002		 Schrödinger wavefunctions,  time-variation of expectation values of position and momentum, Ehrenfest's theorem, validity of Newton's equation of motion in the classical limit, bound and scattering states.

Portraits:
     Paul Ehrenfest
18 Monday
September 23,2002		 Vanishing of the wavefunction at large distances for bound states, scattering states, the free particle, box and delta-function normalisation,  flux for a free particle.