PHYS 290: Quantum

News:

• Guide 11 (v1.0) is posted. The last one!
• 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! It is scheduled for Tuesday December 9, 7 - 9 PM in the Events Barn

Course Info:

Lab Info:

Problem Sets (pdf):

Extras:

• The paper (from PRL) on the Scully-Druhl delayed choice quantum eraser. The wikipedia page on quantum eraser experiments.
• Giustina et al - One of the 2015 "closing the loopholes" in Bell's inequalities papers. The lead author Marissa Giustina describes the challeneges of running such a precision experiment in a castle basement in this article.
• The Stern-Gerlach postcard to Niels Bohr.
• A paper (pdf) on the history of the Stern-Gerlach experiment.
• 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).

Copenhagen Project Resources:

• A re-formated version of the Peierls-Frisch memorandum.
• Bernstein's article [Am. J. Phys. 79 (2011) 440] on the memorandum.
• Serber's Los Alamos primer.
• More on the 1938 Christmas discovery of Meitner and Frisch. Frisch visited his aunt who was in exile in Sweden.
• The PhET fission demo
• Snippets of the Farm Hall transcripts hosted by AIP. The transcripts are available in ``Operation Epsilon: the Farm Hall transcripts" (Burke Q141.O556 1993)
• On YouTube you can see a Kennedy Center performance of Copenhagen and a 2002 PBS film adaptation. Thanks to Syd for these links!

Last modified 6 December 2025