Welcome to Physics 581 ! 

Winter 2012

Instructor: John S. Colton
Email address: "john_" (including the underscore) plus "colton" at "byu dot edu"
Office: N335 ESC, available by appointment
Office hours: TBA

TA:Tyler Park (probably)
Email address: TBA
TA Office hours: TBA

Announcements

• 12 Dec 2011 - Barebones website set up. Updates will be posted here in the Announcements section as appropriate.

Textbooks

• Introduction to Solid State Physics, by Charles Kittel (8^th edition). Required textbook. This is the standard textbook used in solid state physics classes across the country, and will be the dominant source for my lectures and homework problems. We’ll cover the first eight chapters, plus some other odds and ends.  Here is a page of errata for the book: Errata for Kittel - Introduction to Solid State Physics - 8th edition .doc

•  Solid State Physics for Advanced Undergraduate Students, by Harold Stokes. Optional textbook. Dr. Stokes is a faculty member of our department. He taught Phys 581 for many, many years, and wrote this textbook for it. There are a few reasons why I chose the Kittel textbook over the Stokes one, but this is still a good reference. In many cases I found Dr. Stokes’ explanations easier to understand than Kittel’s. Plus it’s published very inexpensively through BYU Academic Publishing. It might be available in the bookstore; if not, ordering information can be found here: http://stokes.byu.edu/textbooks.html

Syllabus

• syllabus - physics 581 - winter 2012

Lecture Notes and Handouts

• lecture 1 - periodic arrays of atoms | handout: Bravais lattices (from Stokes' book)
• lecture 2 - types of lattices, crystal planes
• lecture 3 - various structures
• lecture 4 - diffraction by crystals
• lecture 5 - scattered wave amplitude
• lecture 6 - Fourier analysis of basis
• lecture 7 - Fourier analysis cont., Brillouin zones
• lecture 8 - crystals of inert gases
• lecture 9 - ionic crystals
• lecture 10 - elastic strains | handout: strain tensor handout (my replacement of Kittel pages 73-75)
• lecture 11 - elastic waves in cubic crystals
• lecture 12 - elastic waves in cubic crystals, cont. | handout wave speed examples
• lecture 13 - linear chain of balls and springs | handout 1: some real world phonon dispersion curves | handout 2: linear chain of balls and springs, 2 atoms in basis (plot)
• lecture 14 - two atoms per basis
• lecture 15 - quantization of phonons
• lecture 16 - inelastic scattering, thermo intro | handout: Entropy and Boltzman factor from Phys 123
• lecture 17 - thermo intro, continued
• lecture 18 - phonon heat capacity, density of states, debye model | handout: Debye model (3D)
• lecture 19 - debye cont., einstein model, etc.
• lecture 20 - thermal conductivity, start of chapter 6
• lecture 21 - Fermi-Dirac distribution, density of states for electrons | handout: heat capacity of free electron gas (3D)
• lecture 22 - heat capacity of free electron gas completed
• lectures 23, 24 - guest lecturers
• lecture 25 - electrical and thermal conductivities, Hall effect
• lecture 26 - Hall cont, quantum review | handout: numerical solutions of Schroedinger Eqn
• lecture 27 - quantum cont., Bloch theorem, start of Kronig-Penney (but the Kronig-Penney stuff isn't in this scanned pdf; it will be in next lecture's pdf)
• lecture 28 - kronig-penney, start of empty lattice | handout 1: actual band structures and empty lattice approximations  | handout 2: handout on empty lattice model for [100] direction of simple cubic lattice
• lecture 29 - empty lattice cont, central equation
• lecture 30 - central equation, cont | handout: perturbation theory
• lecture 31- perturbation theory 1
• lecture 32 - perturbation theory 2
• lecture 33 - intro to semiconductors
• lecture 34 - intrinsic concentration, dopants
• lecture 35 - impurity conductivity | handout 1: bandgap engineering | handout 2: impurity graphs from Sze
• lecture 36 - semiconductor junctions
• lecture 37 - maxwell's equations
• lecture 38 - maxwell's equations, cont.
• lecture 39 - Lorentz model of dielectrics
• lecture 40 - polaritons | handout: Yu and Cardona reflectivity graphs
• lecture 41 - metals
• lecture 42 - semester review

Handouts for Upcoming Lectures

• [none remaining]

Homework

• hw 1 - due Wed, 11 Jan 2012 (links to the assignments will be provided as the HW assignments are available)
• hw 2 - due Mon, 23 Jan 2012
• hw 3A - due Fri, 27 Jan 2012
• hw 3B - due Fri, 3 Feb 2012
• hw 4 - due Mon, 13 Feb 2012
• hw 5 - due Wed, 22 Feb 2012
• hw 6 - due Wed, 7 Mar 2012
• hw 7 - due Wed, 21 Mar 2012
• hw 8 - due Fri, 30 Mar 2012
• hw 9 - due Wed, 11 Apr 2012

Grades

• [I've pretty much decided against posting grades; let me know if you have questions about your current grade.]

Exams

• [I decided against posting links to the exams or exam solutions]

Mathematica

• Dr. Colton's Basic Commands of Mathematica document, written as a brief primer for Physics 123 students. (Must be opened with Mathematica.)
• BYU Physics Department's website for Physics 230, where among other things the Introduction to Mathematica textbook can be downloaded.

Supplementary Material

• Dr. Harold Stokes' computer resources for Physics 581 website, which includes 3D crystal structure models for several common structures.
• A site by the Naval Research Lab with many, many crystal structures: http://cst-www.nrl.navy.mil/lattice/

Current Topics in Physics

• Physics Central
• Physical Review Focus
• Physics News Update