Phy 101 Lecture Note Pdf

[Charise Scrivner]

I teach a course in Computer Science in which research is evolving so rapidly. This is an undergrad course. It is difficult to have a comprehensive set of lecture notes prepared every time during the semester. I teach through blackboard only (and I feel students like that thing about me).

Technically, research articles are not the same as lecture notes, as they often are not written in a pedagocically suitable manner. Research articles may include lacunae and gaps that are obvious for an informed reader, but not for a student. So while journal articles can be used as reading material, they are usually not suitable replacement for a good set of lecture notes.

These lecture notes are based on an introductory course on quantum field theory, aimed at Part III (i.e. masters level) students. The full set of lecture notes can be downloaded here, together with videos of the course when it was repeated at the Perimeter Institute. Individual sections can be downloaded below.

The late Sidney Coleman taught the quantum field theory course at Harvardfor many years, influencing a generation of physicists in the waythey view and teach QFT. Below you can find the pdf files of handwrittenlecture notes for Coleman's course (transcribed by Brian Hill). The notes come in two largefiles, each around 6.5 Mb.

I am reading the book by Trudinger at my own and in the book there are many lemmas whose proofs are quite long (and boring). That's why I am searching for lecture notes to see what are the calculations I can skip during first reading.

Edit: I am now interested to learn some parabolic PDE as well. I will appreciate any lecture note / reference on parabolic PDE (especially those references which are useful for application of parabolic PDE in geometric flows).

If you finish these notes and are still hankering for more, try my Quantum Complexity Theory or Great Ideas in Theoretical Computer Science lecture notes, or my Barbados lecture notes. I now have links to all of them on the sidebar on the right.

Incidentally, Petter S: Thanks so much for your Python script that automatically regenerates a combined file! I would like the ability to run that script myself, since there have already been edits and I foresee more.

Thanks for putting up your course notes.
In Lecture 2 you give a brief discussion of why the Schroedinger atomic model resolves the radiation problem of the old quantum theory.
This is a point which caused me confusion and I feel is not well explained in most text books and courses, and often overlooked completely, even though it is very straightforward.
The question of why mathematically the model does not describe electrons spiralling into the nucleus, is actually irrelevant. If it predicted electron distributions which were kinematically stable, but which ought to be very lossy according to classical electromagnetic theory, then there would be a contradiction, just as there is for the Bohr-Sommerfeld model.
The real reason why the Schroedinger model resolves the problem is simply because it predicts electron densities for the time eigenstates states which are constant in time, and probability currents which are d.c., so the dipoles, higher poles and current distributions of these states are predicted by classical EM theory not to radiate.

Petter S #27-28: I use Scientific Workplace (a graphical front-end for LaTeX), but I still need to waste days of every year messing around with LaTeX packages and fonts, and I despise every minute of it.

fred #37: Yeah I noticed that. The only way I could reconcile the (apparent?) contradiction was that it said the vector could not be a tensor product. Perhaps the latter, transformed vector is not technically a tensor product?

oh come on, Nature just does the random choices at Planck timescales, so several trillion trillion trillion random choices every second, each one followed by the entire universe updating via a unitary evolution.

There are probably many universes existing like this with different unitary evolution rules, and many not existing for more than a small timescale because they have non-unitary updates which cause infinite or zero states.

Thank you for this generous primer Scott! I think you are becoming the Richard Feynman, the great explainer, of Computation(as well as making huge contributions to your field just like he did in physics).

Just move on from silly incidents like the tip-jar debacle and social media herds swarming on what they perceive as an easy weak target. None of these things matter compared to the importance of the work you do and the career and family life you have.

James #58: No, once again, one collapse per Planck time would have empirical consequences that are dramatically different from what we observe. It is distinguishable from Many-Worlds, because it would rule out the practical observation of interference effects, but we do see interference effects (which is how we know about QM in the first place). The proposal is flat-out wrong.

So how does each branch remember/record that the probabilities were 2/3 and 1/3?
Is this information preserved in the wave function of the entire universe for each branch?
Is it preserved in the brain of the experimenter? ?

If you take a vector of 100 complex numbers (say), then randomly change the phase (say) of one of them and then evolve the vector by multiplying by a 100100 unitary matrix then you have a new vector of 100 complex numbers.

It is, mathematically in an incredibly huge superposition, with all the possible interference effects possible depending on which branch the evolution took. And yes there are worlds, with tiny probabilities, where in a double slit experiment the photons all end up on one side, same as with deterministic many worlds, but the most probable outcomes are the ones we usually observe, the interference effects are a result of a mathematical calculation which just uses superpositions and schrodinger (unitary) evolution.

In any case, I was much more concerned about deriving 3D space from such a mechanism, since that is the obvious thing we observe that does not exist in a large dimensional Hilbert Space. And I noticed a peculiar result about unitary evolution followed by subtraction of the previous state.

The idea was, that because of the constant random collapses we need to discard the entire previous state of the universe at each evolution step, and I bet if had suggested this in the 1960s when they were fixing QED etc by subtracting infinities it would have got some interest.

I read the first four parts, and it was breezy for me, but I found myself confused by the quantum bomb detector section and I had to reread it a couple times. Maybe the only difference was my level of prior knowledge?

Of course in practice, the thermodynamically vastly more likely thing is that long before this happens, the entanglement will become unobservable due to interactions between one or both of these particles and their environments.

With that data, then, we can conduct a statistical analysis to determine if location affected the outcome in any way. For instance, where does the 4th electron fired tend to land, or is it completely random? Are all the events actually random, or are there any underlying patterns?

The first 6 chapters were originally prepared in 1997-98, Chapter 7 wasadded in 1999, and Chapter 9 was added in 2004.A typeset version of Chapter 8 (on fault-tolerant quantum computation)is not yet available; nor are the figures for Chapter 7. Additional material isavailable in the form of handwritten notes.

The theory of quantum information and quantum computation. Overview ofclassical information theory, compression of quantum information, transmissionof quantum information through noisy channels, quantum entanglement, quantumcryptography. Overview of classical complexity theory, quantum complexity,efficient quantum algorithms, quantum error-correcting codes, fault-tolerantquantum computation, physical implementations of quantum computation.

Certainly it would be useful to have had a previous course on quantummechanics, though this may not be essential. It would also be useful to knowsomething about (classical) information theory, (classical)coding theory, and (classical) complexity theory, since a central goal ofthe course will be generalize these topics to apply to quantum information.But we will review this material when we get to it, so you don't need to worryif you haven't seen it before. In the discussion of quantum coding, we will usesome rudimentary group theory.

In fact, quantum information -- information storedin the quantum state of a physical system -- has weird properties that contrastsharply with the familiar properties of "classical" information. Anda quantum computer -- a new type of machine that exploits the quantumproperties of information -- could perform certain types of calculations farmore efficiently than any foreseeable classical computer.

In this course, we will study the properties that distinguish quantuminformation from classical information. And we will see how these propertiescan be exploited in the design of quantum algorithms that solve certain problemsfaster than classical algorithms can.

A quantum computer will be much more vulnerable than a conventional digitalcomputer to the effects of noise and of imperfections in the machine.Unavoidable interactions of the device with its surroundings will damage thequantum information that it encodes, a process known as decoherence.Schemes must be developed to overcome this difficulty if quantum computers areever to become practical devices.

In this course, we will study quantum error-correcting codes that can beexploited to protect quantum information from decoherenceand other potential sources of error. And we will see how coding can enable aquantum computer to perform reliably despite the inevitable effects of noise.

This is a set of lecture notes on quantum algorithms. These notes were prepared for a course that was offered at the University of Waterloo in 2008, 2011, and 2013, and at the University of Maryland in 2017 and 2021. Each offering of the course covered a somewhat different set of topics. This document collects the material from all versions of the course and includes some further improvements.