Topic outline

  • Week 1: Relativistic quantum mechanics

    All teaching sessions (Monday, Wednesday, Thursday 14:15-16:00) will take place in room R9 (309) in Rakentajanaukio 4 A. That is the building on the other side of the parking lot from Otakaari 1.

    We will start the course with a short introduction to relativistic quantum mechanics and especially consider the Dirac equation.

    Condensed matter topics: Fermi sea, particle-hole excitations, semiconductors etc.


    • Assignment icon
      Week 1 prelecture assignment
    • File icon
      Shankar: Dirac Equation File
      PDF document
      Not available unless: You belong to any group

      Shankar, Principles of quantum mechanics, pages 563-569.

      Bruus&Flensberg does not discuss relativistic quantum mechanics at all, but Shankar has a very nice treatment of the Dirac equation.

    • File icon
      Week 1 lecture jupyter notebook. Updated 12.1.2023. File
      application/x-ipynb+json

      Lectures and exercises are realized as jupyter notebooks. Download this and load to the Aalto jupyter-hub.

      If you are not familiar with Jupyter notebooks, here are quick instructions:

      When server is open, you can drag and drop the jupyter notebook file that you downloaded into the left side column. You might want to create a subdirectory there for yourself. The actual commands of the notebook are performed by pressing shift+enter.

    • Quiz icon
      Week 1, Monday quiz

      Filling this questionnaire will grant you the attendance points for the session. The password will be provided in the session.

    • Quiz icon
      Week 1, Wednesday quiz
    • Quiz icon
      Week 1, Thursday quiz
    • File icon
      Nightreading for week 1: excerpt from Weinberg, The Quantum Theory Of Fields, Vol 1 File
      PDF document
      Not available unless: You belong to any group

      Weinberg The Quantum Theory Of Fields, Vol 1. From Chapter 1: pages 1 to 7, 11 to 13, and 31 to 38.

    • Articles and other material referred to in the lectures:

    • URL icon
      Light-cone-like spreading of correlations in a quantum many-body system URL

      Cheneau, M., Barmettler, P., Poletti, D. et al. Light-cone-like spreading of correlations in a quantum many-body system. Nature 481, 484–487 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1038/nature10748

    • File icon
      Photosynthetic light harvesting: excitons and coherence File
      PDF document
      Not available unless: You belong to any group

      Fassioli, F., Dinshaw, R., Arpin, P. C., & Scholes, G. D. (2013). Photosynthetic light harvesting: excitons and coherence. Journal of The Royal Society Interface, 11, 20130901. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsif.2013.0901

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Week 2: Dirac equation applied