Statistical Mechanics: Phonons - an excerpt

Apr 01, 2012 14:22

On the umpteenth night of her quest across the land of Topologica, she came unto the wastes of the Crystal Lattice. The light of her Blackbody Lamp shone steadily onto the undulating landscape. She took a step onto the roughly regular surface, and watched in veiled curiosity as her footstep rippled outward underneath the surface.

"Alright," she said into the warm dry air. "I can model the vibrations like a system of simple harmonic oscillators."

Heart pounding, she jumped onto the Lattice, and sighed with relief when nothing untoward happened. Off in the distance, the particles of the Lattice wiggled back and forth in the dimming lamplight.

"The vibrations can be quantized..?" she ventured. The Lattice continued to flicker where the light hit. She was silent, and then she burst out.

"All right, all right, I went to a talk on the history of superconductors and I didn't really understand it but these quantized vibrations work like bosons, like the light from my lamp if you wanted to count photons but photons are electromagnetic waves not vibrations of particles in a lattice in a fictional wasteland. Now, O Riddler, may I leave?" And she rolled her die...

[So our prof assigns a topic to read a few days in advance and describe briefly in few technical paragraphs or a creative medium of our choice. Creative pieces are usually marked much easier. Marks are deducted for excessive math vs English description. These can usually be pulled off in a couple hours at most. Comment: "Fun! Amazing you pulled this off @ the beginning of class! 10/10" Ironic considering that I've done all these previews half an hour before, if not during or after the class its due...]

statmech previews, original fiction, snippet

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