E-Book Overview
These notes are designed as a text book for a course on the Modern Physics Theory for undergraduate students. The purpose is providing a rigorous and self-contained presentation of the simplest theoretical framework using elementary mathematical tools. A number of examples of relevant applications and an appropriate list of exercises and answered questions are also given.
The first part is devoted to Special Relativity concerning in particular space-time relativity and relativistic kinematics.
The second part deals with Schroedinger's formulation of quantum mechanics. The presentation concerns mainly one dimensional problems, in particular tunnel effect, discrete energy levels and band spectra.
The third part concerns the application of Gibbs statistical methods to quantum systems and in particular to Bose and Fermi gasses.
E-Book Content
Preface
During the last years of the Nineteenth Century, the development of new techniques and the refinement of measuring apparatuses provided an abundance of new data whose interpretation implied deep changes in the formulation of physical laws and in the development of new phenomenology. Several experimental results lead to the birth of the new physics. A brief list of the most important experiments must contain those performed by H. Hertz about the photoelectric effect, the measurement of the distribution in frequency of the radiation emitted by an ideal oven (the so-called black body radiation), the measurement of specific heats at low temperatures, which showed violations of the Dulong–Petit law and contradicted the general applicability of the equi-partition of energy. Furthermore we have to mention the discovery of the electron by J. J. Thomson in 1897, A. Michelson and E. Morley’s experiments in 1887, showing that the speed of light is independent of the reference frame, and the detection of line spec