2013 condensed matter physics notes now available on amazon.com

March 26, 2019 math and physics play , ,

My notes for from the fall 2013 session of the University of Toronto Condensed Matter Physics course (PHY487H1F), taught by Prof. Stephen Julian, are now available for $10 USD in book form (black-and-white, 329 pages) from kindle-direct-publishing on amazon.com.  I took this course as a non-degree student.

These notes are also available for free in the following formats:

  • In color, for free as a PDF.
  • from github as latex, scripts, and makefiles.

The official course description at the time was:

Introduction to the concepts used in the modern treatment of solids. The student is assumed to be familiar with elementary quantum mechanics. Topics include: bonding in solids, crystal structures, lattice vibrations, free electron model of metals, band structure, thermal properties, magnetism and superconductivity (time permitting)

notes for phy450, relativistic electrodynamics, now available on paper from amazon.

March 4, 2019 math and physics play , , ,

My notes from the spring 2011 session of  Relativistic Electrodynamics (PHY450H1S) are now updated to use a 6×9″ format (387 pages), and are available on paper from amazon.  This was the second course I took as a non-degree physics student, and was taught by Prof. Erich Poppitz.

These notes pages, 6×9″) are available in a few formats:

  • In paper (black and white) through amazon’s kindle-direct-publishing for $11 USD.
  • In color, for free as a PDF.
  • from github as latex, scripts, and makefiles.

Links or instructions for the formats above are available here.

Changelog.

phy450.V0.1.9.pdf

  • switch to 6×9″ format
  • fix a whole bunch of too-wide equations, section-headings, … that kdp finds objectionable.
  • suppress page numbers for 1st page of preface, contents, index and bib. This is a hack for my hack of classicthesis, because I don’t have the 6×9 layout right, and the page numbers for that first page end up in an unprintable region that kdp doesn’t allow.
  • add periods to chapter, figure, section, problem captions.
  • remove lots of blank lines before and after equations (which latex turns into paragraphs). That cuts 10s of pages from the book length!
  • move version numbers into separate file (make.revision)

my phy452 stat mech notes available in paper on amazon

March 2, 2019 math and physics play

My notes (6×9″ ~400 pages) for the winter 2013 session of the University of Toronto Basic Statistical Mechanics course (PHY452H1S), taught by Prof. Arun Paramekanti, which I took as a non-degree student, are now available for purchase on paper.  Available formats include:

  • Printed (6×9″ black-and-white) from kindle-direct-publishing, for $10.99 USD,
  • as a free PDF,
  • or by cloning the github repositories that host the latex sources.

Links to the various copies are available here.  I suspect that nobody will buy this (although there are lots of solved problems that might be of interest), but I wanted a printed reference copy for myself, and this was an extremely cheap way to get a bound copy (i.e. $6 USD plus shipping for a “not for resale” review draft).

Changelog (since last posted version)

phy452.V0.1.10.pdf

  • Re-export mathematica based figures as .pdf instead of .png
  • Add commas and periods into equation,dmath contexts.
  • remove blank lines between text and equation/dmath that are connected.
  • switch to 6×9 format for kindle direct publishing and reformat various equations that overflowed page boundaries.
  • use tcolorbox for tables
  • suppress page numbers for list of figures, table of contents, and first page in chapters.This is a hack to deal with my hacking of classicthesis.sty, as it wants to put some of those page numbers in an unprintable region that kdp doesn’t like (and won’t ignore.)
  • replace crude battery/resistor diagram with an svg based figure (with transparency)
  • shrink various figures.
  • periods on chapter, section, and figure captions.
  • move versioning to separate file: make.revision

Electromagnetic theory notes

February 19, 2019 Uncategorized

I’ve posted a minor update (tweaking some of the figures) of my PDF notes from electromagnetic theory (ECE1228H), such as they are.  You can also find links to Mathematica notebooks, and instructions for cloning the git repositories to build the PDF.

Despite my love of the subject, this course was mediocre, and I’d rate my notes for it the same way.

 

Antenna theory notes

February 18, 2019 math and physics play

I’ve made a small update to my old PDF notes for the antenna theory class that I took in 2015.

The changes since the last posted version are:

  1. The 2D Mathematica based figures are now updated to use PlotStyle -> Thick, which I think looks better when embedded.  Since I used Mathematica, Julia, Matlab and hand-drawn figures, there’s not much consistency in the figure styles.
  2. The hyperlinks to the web pages I’d created to run the various CDF Manipulate notebooks have also been removed, since Wolfram dropped the ball and never implemented support for 64-bit browsers.

Unfortunately, the 3D figures from various Mathematica 3D plots are really slow to render (at least in Adobe Acrobat), which is also annoying.  I’m not sure what the best way to deal with that would be.