Physics 261: Structured Fluids Winter, 2009 http://panza.uchicago.edu/Phys.261/

Aim of course

Instructors

Lecturer: Tom Witten, Research Institutes L104 t-witten@uchicago.edu
Office hour: I plan to be available immediately after each class for questions on the material. Other times are available by appointment.

Teaching assistant: Jonathan Stricker < jonathan.stricker at gmail.com>
Office hour: Monday 1-2 KPTC 303/305

Class meetings

Lecture, Tuesday, Thursday 12:00--1:20, room KPTC 105
Discussion, led by TA, Tuesday 5:30, place: third floor of Kersten

Text book

The text for the course was published in 2004. It developed from lecture notes from this course. The book is out of print and is not so readily available. For help getting a copy, log on to the Chalk site for this course . The announcement page there suggests places to get the book. It also provides a link to an online copy of the book.

Other books will be useful at times when more background is needed. For details see here.

Foretaste

• Biophysical prospectus

  Two short articles in Reviews of Modern Physics give a flavor of the approach and content of this course:

• Polymer Solutions: a Geometric Introduction
• Insights from Soft Matter

Level and Prerequisites

The course is intended for advanced undergraduates in physical science. The prior courses you need are
• a calculus-level introductory physics sequence such as Physics 131--133
• an introductory statistical physics course such as Physics 197.
• knowledge of Fourier transforms is very desirable for our study of scattering.

Work for credit

Homework assignments

To help you grasp the material, I have made up some problems to work. The "assignments" linked in the navigation bar above shows the current assignments and due dates. Problems will be assigned each week and are due the following week.

Midterm

I plan to have a midterm during class on Thursday, February 5.

Project

An experimental report will be due on Tuesday, March 10. Suitable experiments will be suggested along with the problem sets. Experiments may be with real materials or with simple computer simulations. The suggested experiments are informal ones aimed at answering a simple question. The experimental report should be roughly three pages long. It should state the purpose of the experiment, describe how it was performed, report the experimental data, and discuss how this data supports or disagrees with the hypothesis being studied. I will ask you to tell me the project you have chosen around February 24. I'll want you to write me a note about how you are planning to do it around March 1.

Final exam

the final exam will probably be in the canonical time slot.

Web site for course information

I will use the university's instructional site Chalk to communicate with you and distribute information. If you log onto this site, you will see a link to this course on the right hand side. Please keep tabs on the Chalk site for announcements, last minute changes, etc. The page you are reading now and other course materials are maintained on a separate server, but your primary source is the Chalk site.

Plan of Lectures

My current plan for the lectures is linked from the navigation bar at the top of the page.