Description

Physics is finished, young man. It’s a dead-end street.
Unknown teacher of Max Planck, late nineteenth century

In this course by term modern, we mean important work that was done after the “Physics is finished” period. We will discuss mainly fairly old subjects, only some parts of the course can be considered as an introduction to current problems in physics. The basic plan will be to cover several important topics in Solid state, Atomic, and Elementary particle physics. In order to discuss these topics in this course, one needs to know some important subjects from thermodynamics, statistical mechanics and quantum mechanics, therefore part of the lectures will be devoted to studying them as well.

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Course Assistants

• Lecturer: Ilmar Gahramanov (office KB 331 H)
• Guest Lecturers:
• Assistants: Taha Ayfer, Mustafa Mullahasanoglu, Batuhan Keskin

Outline

Project

Projects will involve studying a paper of interest, writing a 5 – (infinity) page report and making a brief oral online presentation (20 – 30 minutes) at the end of the course. Below are project suggestions with brief descriptions, each student supposed to prepare one project. If you have other ideas regarding topics, you can contact me. Please, try to decide on your project topic by April 20, 2021.

List of papers

Examination

The grade will be composed as follows: problem sessions 40%, homework 20%, typed notes of a project (pdf and tex-files) 10%, presentation 10%, exams 20%. The projects will be evaluated according to the clarity of exposition, effort, and calculations.

Literature

There is a huge number of textbooks for the course of Modern Physics, I mention here some of them. We will study roughly the same topics mentioned in these textbooks, however, I am not going to follow any specific book. There is also a list of papers (mainly on popular level) suggested for reading.

Literature

• I.V. Savelyev, Physics – A General Course, Volume 3

• Additional literature

• L.D. Landau, L. M. Lifshitz, Quantum Mechanics
• L.D. Landau, L. M. Lifshitz, Statistical Physics
• A.A. Abrikosov, Fundamentals of the Theory of Metals
• L.B. Okun, Leptons and Quarks
• V.V. Schmidt, The Physics of Superconductors

Papers (these papers are not for projects)

• S.Girvin, Spin and Isospin: Exotic Order in Quantum Hall Ferromagnets (Physics Today, 2000)
• M. Batchelor, The Bethe ansatz after 75 years (Physics Today, 2007)
• F. Dyson, Birds and Frogs (AMS Notices 2009)
• F. Dyson, The future of physics (Physics Today, 1970)
• F. Dyson, Missed Opportunities, (Bull. Amer. Math. Soc., 1972)
• V. Arnol’d, Mathematics and physics: mother and daughter or sisters? (Physics-Uspekhi, 1999)
• E. Witten, What every physicist should know about string theory (Physics Today, 2015)
• A. Lagendijk, B. van Tiggelen, and D. Wiersma, Fifty years of Anderson localization (Physics Today, 2009)
• P. Anderson, More is different (Science, 1972)
• S. Weinberg, Particle physics, from Rutherford to the LHC (Physics Today, 2011)
• A. J. Coleman, Groups and Physics (AMS Notices, 1997)

Final results of students