Weblog Yuli Nazarov
Fourth lecture Advanced Statistical Mechanics 2013
During this lecture, we have finished the material of the Lecture 3 except several slides which we look at in two weeks. Well, this tempo is normal: we had the same last years. Still I hesitate to make 4 slide sets out of 3: the borders between different topics do not fit nicely such separation. The audience is pretty large, there is a satisfactory interaction, although I feel little feedback.
First Problem-Solving Session Quantum Transport 2013
Today I have delivered homework explanations for Quantum Transport course. I haven’t done this for ages, so was not sure about my performance. Yet it appeared to be fun, at least for me, we have dealt with many things including the tricks of Taylor expansion 🙂 And we managed to complete all the problems on time.
Third Lecture Quantum Transport 2013
Today we have finished the interference, and made a half of the third lecture finishing by Laplace equation. There is thus a stable delay by a half of the lecture. The audience has stabilized, remains bigger than a year ago. They look serious.
Third Lecture Advanced Statistical Mechanics 2013
was today, on the last day of February. We have started with Lagrangian multipliers, of all things, since this piece of analysis did not sound to more than a half of the students. Then we finish the probabilities, and get to the formulation of statistical mechanics. As a matter of fact, we have just started lecture #3 with an example of a two-level system. The lecture appeared more abstract and dry than intended, I have to work on this.
Second Lecture Quantum Transport 2013
has taken place today. I begin to like the room F 104 where the lectures take place. It’s cozy, and I can conveniently sit while giving the lecture. We went through counting statistics and a half of the quantum interference lecture, just finishing Aharonov-Bohm effect. We have had an interesting discussion of the effect.
Second Lecture Advanced Statistical Mechanics 2013
was mostly about probability theory, a stuff pretty dry by itself. To make sure that I’m not making drier than it is, I’ve invited Jos Thijssen, director of master education, to provide some feedback. His impression from the lecture was favourable. It was also my impression of last years that during this lecture I loose a significant part of the audience. Let us hope it won’t be the case this year.
Cirprian Padurariu has defended his Ph.D. thesis with me on 18-2-2013.
We did four papers together. Leo Kouwenhoven, Yaroslav Blanter, Daniel Esteve, Leonid Gorelik, Jan Aarts ans Jan Zaanen were the commitee members. Ciprian will go to Grenoble for a post-doc position soon. Good luck, Ciprian!
Fairy Tales 2013
our showcase course of theoretical physics has started with a bigger number of students. They looked sufficiently fascinated. There was a problem with lecture tempo and detail level. Anybody read this? Can I have some feedback please?
First Lecture Quantum Transport 2013
there were many students as well. Somehow I wanted to say more about elementary quantum mechanics than it was intended. I do not think I did it trying to come in tune with the audience: I think its level was higher. Anyway, I did not have time to say a word about counting statistics: must do this in a week.
First lecture Advanced Statistical Mechanics 2013
Before the lecture I was shocked by a ridicuously big number of students who have enlisted themselfs for the course. In fact, it almost exceeded the capacity of the room reserved for the lecture. The reality appeared more realistic, still the number of attendees was pretty high. There has been even a hope risen that it stays high during the course.
The students are also much more active in enlisting for the presentations – another good sign.
Thus inspired, I made the lecture in a pretty good pace: I almost finished it! There was an interaction with the audience. A daughter of a colleague bashed me about mistakes in the slides.
No, seriously, it was a good start!