Exam#

We will close this course with an exam in form of a final project. This final project shall be on a topic of your choice or on one of the topics we provide as example topics. Each individual student is required to hand in a Jupyter Notebook. No group work is allowed for the final project.

The final project is in the form of a portfolio exam as it consists of two parts. Each part has to be passed. If you fail in one part, the whole exam counts as failed!

1. Successfull submission of exercise solutions

We will hand out assignments weekly. You will have to hand in the solutions within a week with a strict deadline. Successful submission of 6 out of all exercise sheets in time means you have passed this part of the portfolio exam.

2. Jupyter notebook containing the final project

Notebooks shall follow the following outline

  • Introduction You introduce into the problem you are covering with your notebook and motivate what your are going to do. The Introduction should also cover a basic theoretical description for the problem to be solved.

  • Results & Discussion You develop the code for your problem and discuss and anotate the individual steps in your notebook. It is important that you discuss the individual results highlighting their consequences.

  • Summary You summarize your findings.

Grading: Notebooks will be graded based on:

  • structure of the notebook (outline, citations, …)

  • quality of the code (use of functions for repeated code, classes, modules, function of the notebook)

  • quality of the plots (axis labels, readability of the labels)

  • use of concepts we used for the notebooks (use of markdown, multiple code cells )

The deadline for handing in the project is September 4, 2024, at 1pm sharp! Do not miss the deadline!!!!!!

Please submit your projects via email to Andrea Kramer, firstname.surname@uni-leipzig.de.

Since many of you asked for some guiding topics and I as well hope that you do not submit a simulation of planetary motion, here are some topics, though some of them might be for the advanced physicist.

Mechanics#

  • planetary motion (of course)

  • the Brachistochrone, first find out what it is, and then simulate it

  • N-coupled pendula and mechanical waves

  • elastic/inelastic collisions

  • spinning top

Thermodynamics/Statistical Physics#

  • ideal gas law from microscopic particle motions and wall collisions

  • Maxwell deamon, find out what it is and simulate

  • entropy from microstates

  • Carnot cycle

  • Vicsek model, find out what it is and simulate

Optics#

  • Caustics: ray tracing through spherical surfaces with paraxial approximation

  • Caustics: ray tracing through spherical surfaces without paraxial approximation

  • imaging errors, aberations

  • ray tracing of a prism with wavelength dependent refractive index

  • light propagation through and optical fiber

Electrodynamics#

  • thin film interference

  • electromagnetic wave propagation through thin films (Fresnel coefficients)

  • double slit experiment with light

  • grating diffraction, grating resolution

  • scattering of an electron on a Coulomb potential (classical)

  • array of freely rotating magnets

Quantum Mechanics#

  • wave packet in a periodic potential

  • scattering of an electron on a Coulomb potential (quantum mechanical)