PHYS 290: Quantum

News:

• Guide 9 is now posted. It is due Friday November 21 before class.
• Lab next week (Tuesday November 18 and Friday November 21) will be drop in hours for curving fitting your data, for instance form the interference lab the first week and for single photon interference.
• We have a talk on observations of black holes on Monday! Talk at 4:10. Snacks at 4.
• If you wish to read a treatment on the ladder operators see Daniel Schoeder's textbook (pdf). See section 6.2 for the argument.
• I have posted a quick intro to Dirac notation. Please feel free to send along suggestions!
• If you wish to (re-)submit a solution to the numerical integration of the bouncing ball problem, please show me your solutions, including energies and wavefunctions on a computer before break.
• If you wish you may submit a rewrite of the fourth problem of the midterm for additional points (up to 22 out of 25, which will be scaled). Submit these corections no later than November 21.
• The weighting of assignments in lab is 40% in lab work, 20% writing assignments, 15% prelabs, 5% rough draft of full lab report, and 20% final lab report. The syllabus is updated with this information.
• The Copenhagen event is happening! If you signed out a copy Copenhagen please read it to dertmine whether you wish to be part of the staged reading. These decisions will be made in class on November 19.

Course Info:

Lab Info:

Problem Sets (pdf):

Extras:

• A very nice orbital visualization tool for the hydrogenic atom.
• A quick, two page Dirac notation intro.
• Schoeder's quantum mechanics textbook (pdf full book)
• Hydrogen atom plots from Townsend and Eisenberg and Resnick
• Want to play with the barrier/tunneling sim we saw in class? Here is the link to the PhET demo. It runs in Java so some installation may be necessary...
• The 2025 Nobel Prize in physics was awarded for "for the discovery of macroscopic quantum mechanical tunneling and energy quantization in an electric circuit" and was discussed in an APS news story on the discoveries.
• Extra practice questions for midterm.
• The front cover.
• Plot from the C60 interference experiment of Arndt et al, reference 35 in this paper: Am J Phys 71 (2003) 324.
• Data from the He interference experiments: case 1 case 2 (pdf)
• The PhET photoelectric effect webpage. (PhET's are nifty online physics simulations hosted by UC Boulder.)
• On intsalling python (Thanks to Megan!)
• Plots from the Aspect et al single photon interference experiment.
• A webpage for python play.
• Single and double slit intensity plots (pdf).

Last modified 13 November 2025