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Optics and Modern Physics

Fall 1999

Class Time:  MWF 11:50 AM - 12:40 PM
Class Room:  Room 157 Physics Building

• Exam Schedule, Grading Policy
• Textbooks and Reading Assignments
• Syllabus
• Where to Find Dan and Junfei, Office Hours
• Labs
• Homework Assignments
• Other neat links
• Applets related to the course

Some reasons why you should care about this course:

• Physics is fun (need I say more?!)
• Quantum Mechanics is Weird
• There are exciting research projects going on in the Department (We'll be going on some lab tours, etc.)
• Optical diffraction limits how much data you can fit on an optical disk.  I'll tell you about up-and-coming technology that will allow us to store > 1 Tbit/cm^3!  Below is an electron migrogaph of a CD showing pits representing binary 0's and 1's. What sets the scale of these features? Check out the CD-ROM Information Page to learn more (I took the image from this page).

• The size of computer chips can't shrink too much because of the wave nature of matter.  Below is an experimentally measured electron probability distribution for a structure of iron atoms placed on a (very flat!) copper surface.  Each "mountain" indicates the location of a single iron atom.  Go to the IBM web page on STM (scanning tunneling microscopy) to learn more.  We'll be learning about quantum mechanical tunneling in this course!  (I took this image from the IBM STM page).