Physics in Applications

It is the first course in a series of two courses (PHYS 299A and PHYS 299B), taken in consecutive terms. This is a capstone course required for Physics Majors and taken in two consecutive terms. It includes lectures grouped in modules, a seminar, and a project. The objective is to integrate students’ knowledge of the basic theoretical courses by exploring applications of Electromagnetic Theory, Quantum Mechanics, and Statistical Physics. The course material may reflect research interests of faculty members and is coordinated with experiments constituting the Senior Lab course and with the Computational Physics projects to emphasize the dynamics between theory, experiments, and computational work. The seminar is based on faculty presentations of original seminal papers pertaining to the course material, and project presentations by the students. The project could range from a computational exploration of a problem to designing a new experiment for a Junior or Senior Lab, or to designing a demonstration for the basic physics courses. Every term.