PHY 742 -- Computational assignment

Talks we be given on Monday evening, Apr. 19, 1999. Please meet at 6:30 PM in the Physics lounge for pizza. The presentations will be given in Room 107 immediately following.

The purpose of this assignment is to complete an in-depth study an Quantum Mechanical topic of interest to you during the week of March 22-26. Students who do not attend the March APS meeting should choose a topic related to their research or develop a topic of their own choosing. Several suggestions are given below. Students who attend the March APS meeting should arrange to attend one or more talks on a subject involving concepts related to the material covered in our Quantum Mechanics II course. In general, it will be necessary to consult additional references in order to complete the project. Each student should prepare a 20-30 minute talk about their project to share with the class. The talk should include:

1. Motivation and discription of the project
2. A discussion of the basic electrodynamic principles involved in the project
3. A discussion of the main results
4. Conclusions and outlook for additional work along these lines.

• Study in more detail the two-electron model problem discussed in Assignment #12 and in the Kestner-Sinanoglu paper. More references are available upon request. The differential equation for the radial relative coordinate can be solved numerically.
• Study in more detail the electronic structure of atoms as represented by the density functional computer programs graphatom and frozencore. Perform a series of calculations on several materials or one material in several electronic configurations and compare with spectroscopic measurements.
• Evaluate atomic term energies for one or more open shell systems, performing the summation over Clebsch-Gordan and Gaunt coefficients to obtain weight factors for each of the radial integrals. Compare your results with the expressions given in Condon & Shortley's text.
• More suggestions available by request.