Thursday, April 23, 2009

Key dates: Quiz, Midterm and HW

Here is a summary of key dates:
* the due date for this week's HW is Friday (Apr 23, tomorrow)) at 4:00 PM. (my mailbox in the physics mailroom).

* There will be a Quiz this Tuesday (Apr 28)

* Our Midterm will be on Thursday, May 7

FAQ's
1) What will be on the quiz?
Well for a while this afternoon I couldn't think of anything that seemed appropriate for a quiz. Everything i could think of seemed too long, or too vague, or too qualitative; so I was about to give up on the quiz and then I thought of something that seemed pretty good.

It involves time dependence and a suddenly changing potential. I envision it with a computational part (a), an essay/discussion question of moderate length (b), and then a challenging quasi-conceptual, quasi-computational part (c) (that no one will have adequate time for haha). (Or maybe I am wrong about that last part?)

I would suggest becoming really adept in getting the actual value of indefinite integrals of Gausssians (extending to infinity), and in dealing with situations where a potential changes suddenly as a function of time.

Imagine you state function drifting through time. What would you do? Be the state function...

If i come up with any more thoughts when i write the problem, I will post more here. Feel free to post your questions and comments here. -Zack

5 comments:

  1. Not sure where to post this (it's sort of for general use), but I found an interesting applet that displays various potentials, and seems pretty enlightening. Here's the link:

    http://www.falstad.com/qm1d/

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  2. zack, can you male sure to post the solutions to homework 3 and 4 this weekend, so I can make sure I'm doing everything right.thank!

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  3. The HW#3 solutions are now in the original HW#3 post.

    I'll post the HW4 solutions pretty soon.

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  4. Perhaps if I try hard enough to be the wave function in it's complete superposition state I can project myself onto the barely perceptible eigenvector associated with getting 100% on the quiz. Although I would probably still botch the calculus involved in projecting that eigenvector onto Cartesian space. Can we take the quiz in Hilbert space?

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  5. Well, looking at your state function now, I would say that the amplitude for you getting 100% on the quiz is pretty high, maybe at least 0.71 .

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