Posts tagged AQM

We got through the formal part of the course – and started enjoying the examples! Magnetism, the puzzle of centuries:) I’ve put quite some new material I’ve never taught before. This was about magnons and other excitations in a magnet. I was not sure I could do it in time from the first attempt and warned the students in the beginning that perhaps I will have to skip this part.

Well, it went better than expected, though I had to skip a couple of slides. Moreover, it looks I could catch an attention provoking questions. The idea of the energy splitting of two spin subbands has spontaneously originated in the audience, a way before I was planning to talk about it. Nice 🙂

Anyway, there is room for improvement for the next time.

Neither Michael nor Albert could help me on this day: I had to do PSS myself. Fortunately all students were in place with the presentations and spoke sense. I also gave some practical advices on second-quantization calculations: hope it works. Besides, I asked students to fill in a survey about the course. I will investigate the data collected and present the results on next week.

was the core of the course: second quantization. It was pretty formal, though I did my best to outline the logics and motivation behind the formulas. The students were warned that it will be boring, so they remain rather accepting. I went slower trying to establish better contact. This resulted in a time problem: in fact, I said only few most important things about fermion quantization. Luckily, it is almost the same as for bosons.

on this Monday was reasonably well attended. The topic: identical particles, despite importance and fundamental interest, was rather easy, both for me and for students. This gave enough time to go slow and even made an actual experiment with identical particles 😉 There was a good contact. Hope we can go on in this pace.

took place on Thursday. Since it was not my show – it is that of Michael Wimmer and Albert Gonzalez – I attended only the first part. I was extremely pleased with the student presentation. Basically, it was about the topic that I have to skip during the lecture and felt guilty about since the topic is nice and rather important for the whole course. The presentation was next to ideal: the topic has been presented clearly, the audience was attending, the message got through.

There were many students at the session. Actually, we have run out of the presentation topics: more students want to present, we need to arrange some extra sessions for this in the second half of the semester.

has been made today after a long break – 5 year break. I was delighted to get back to my favorite course, equipped with a text-book “Advanced Quantum Mechanics: A practical guide” by Jeroen Danon and me, the book that came out for the cost of so much time and energy.

The classroom was full: up to the last seat(!), it was pretty inspiring. The audience has reacted well on the questions and jokes: at least a part of it. The topic was a bit dry: we have refreshed ordinary quantum mechanics. To the end of the lecture there was a time problem, the end went too fast. Ok, I warned that the first three lectures are dry.

We’ll see what happens next.