Electrostatics

Browse Course Materials

Course Materials are organized by collection (e.g., administrative, clicker questions, etc.). Links to both printable PDFs and editable source documents have been provided.

Please note, while this interface is designed to allow for easy browsing of the Quantum I materials, it represents only a subset of the available resources. Additional materials and support documents can be found on the download page in a zip format.

Administrative

This course has been taught in a 3-day 50 minute meeting format. This page contains a few "administrative" documents you might find useful.

Our Fa08 syllabus is here, although you might find the online version more complete and useful, available at http://www.colorado.edu/physics/phys3220/phys3220_fa08

  • Sample Weekly Calendar (Spring 2008) [XLS]
  • Sample Weekly Calendar (Fall 2008) [PDF]
  • Sample Syllabus (Fall 2008) [DOC] [PDF]
  • Sample Schedule (Spring 2009) [DOC] [PDF]
  • Sample Background Survey [DOC] [PDF]
  • Sample Pre-semester email to all students [VIEW]

Sample Lecture notes

Quantum Mechanics lecture notes, made available to the students. Notes are by Steven Pollock (SJP) or Michael Dubson (MD). There are older versions (of scanned, handwritten) notes on the download page.

  • Chapter 1 "The Wave Function" Notes [DOC] (SJP)
  • Chapter 1 "The Wave Function" Notes [PDF]—Part 1 (SJP)
  • Chapter 1 "The Wave Function" Notes [PDF]—Part 2 (SJP)
  • Chapter 2 "The Time-Independent Schrödinger Equation" Notes [DOC] [PDF] (SJP)
  • Chapter 3 "Formalism" Notes [DOC] [PDF] (MD)
  • Chapter 3 "Formalism" Notes [DOC] [PDF] (SJP)
  • Chapter 4 "Quantum Mechanics in Three Dimensions" Notes [DOC] [PDF] (SJP)
  • Weekly Class Notes [DOC] [PDF] (SJP)

Concept Tests/Clicker Questions

In our implementation, students are required to own a personal response device (a clicker). These concept tests are posed during lecture and were used to facilitate discussion and test comprehension of different concepts.

The concept test collections on this site were largely constructed by Michael Dubson in Spring 2008, and then modified and added to by Steven Pollock and Oliver DeWolfe in Fall 2008, with some technical assistance from Steve Goldhaber. A few were taken from other sources, we tried to acknowledge this in the "notes" on the PowerPoint® pages.

Some comments in the notes section of each slide will inform you about what happened in our class when they were used. Feedback, your own results, and your own additions would be most welcome! Please email .

Please note that while we have tried to make these files as portable as possible, inconsistencies between versions of PowerPoint and between platforms will cause some slides to not appear correctly. The most common problem is a formula which looks scrambled. One common fix is simply to open the formula in the equation editor, save it, and close the editor. Please contact Steve Goldhaber if you have major problems using any of these files.

  • Concept Tests Chapter 1 "The Wave Function" [PPT] [PDF]
  • Concept Tests Chapter 2 "The Time-Independent Schrödinger Equation" [PPT] [PDF]
  • Concept Tests Chapter 3 "Formalism" [PPT] [PDF]
  • Concept Tests Chapter 4 "Quantum Mechanics in Three Dimensions" [PPT] [PDF]
  • Fall 2009 Concept Tests [PPT] [PDF]

Tutorials & Pre-tests

Over the last four semesters, we have used several different tutorials from the University of Washington. Please contact Peter Shaffer (shaffer@phys.washington.edu) if you are interested in those materials. They are still under development, and not generally available to any faculty, but you might discuss with UW if you might be a “pilot site”, as we did.

We have written seven tutorial-like exercises which are listed below. (Forgive our generous usage of the word “tutorials”, our materials are by no means at the level of research-based activities as the University of Washington's Tutorials). Some of these exercises were written using Microsoft Word. Source files for the ones written in LaTeX files are on the download page and include the LaTeX source, a generated PDF document, and the figure files necessary to rebuild the tutorial. There is a pre-test for each of these tutorials included on the download page.

The CU tutorials are:

Our Tutorials were run once a week for about an hour (sometimes longer). They were optional and while attendance varied, over the course of the term, a large fraction of the students attended at least one. They were widely praised in end-of-term evaluations as being helpful and fun, so we think it would be worth devoting more effort into researching these, and developing them systematically. For the last three semesters, the tutorials have been offered as an optional one-credit co-seminar which helps with scheduling.

Because the curriculum varies from semester to semester, so do the tutorials which are run each semester. As an aid in planning, the tutorial schedule for the last four semesters are included in this folder.

Homework Questions/Assignments

This section has homework sets built by Mike Dubson, Steve Pollock, and Oliver DeWolfe. Some of them are basically Griffiths' problems, slightly disguised, or tweaked. We tried to add elements of explanation, sense-making, estimation or approximation, real-world connections, multiple-representations. Some problems come from other texts, or from other faculty at CU. We have not done a very good job of acknowledging "sources" here, our apologies.

Oliver DeWolfe wrote problem sets in LaTeX, both LaTeX and PDF versions are available for download below.

Notes:

Griffiths' solution manuals are easily available on the web, which was one reason for at least changing the problems enough to make a little more challenging for students to simply "look up" the answer.

The Homework Observations document contains detailed instructor notes from homework help sessions.

Homework Solutions

Solutions to homework sets are available on the download page and are password protected. Please contact to obtain access to the solutions.

Exams (secure)

Exams and solutions are available to instructors. Please contact to obtain access to exams and solutions.

  • Exams from Fall 2007 [DOWNLOAD]
  • Exams from Spring 2008 [DOWNLOAD]
  • Exams from Fall 2008 [DOWNLOAD]
  • Exams from Spring 2009 [DOWNLOAD]
  • Exams from Fall 2011 [DOWNLOAD]

In-class Activities

These activities that we used in class to support relevant quantum concepts. The “quiz” files were done as activities at the start of class - sort of like a whiteboard, but they first worked about 5 minutes on their own, then another 5-10 together, then we talked them through.

We used PhET Sims in several lectures:

These are all excellent class activities (show/discuss/predict...)