Topics in Spin

• Lead Instructor: Professor Stephen Sekula
• Additional Instructors: Professor Roberto Vega; Tingting Cao
• (Office Hours) by appointment

Lecture Notes for all lectures from 3/11 -- 4/08

• 2014/03/11 [FOSC 158, 1-3pm]: Introduction and Mathematical Tools
  [Solutions to Exercises] [Video]
• 2014/03/13 [FOSC 158, 1-3pm]: Orbital Angular Momentum
  [Solutions to Exercises] [Video]
• 2014/03/20 [FOSC 202, 2-4pm]: Spin and Addition of Angular Momentum
  [Video]
• 2014/03/25 [FOSC 202, 2-4pm]: The General Problem of Adding Angular Momentum
  [Video]
• 2014/03/27 [FOSC 202, 2-4pm]: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics and Spin
  
• 2014/04/03 [FOSC 202, 2-4pm]: Rotations; Decay Angular Distributions (a first peek)
• 2014/04/08 [FOSC 202, 2:30-4:30pm]: The Helicity Formalism (I) [Vega]
• 2014/04/10 [FOSC 202, 2-3:30pm]: The Helicity Formalism (II) [Vega]

• 2014/03/11: Homework 1: Basic Mathematics [SOLUTIONS]
• 2014/03/13: Homework 2: Orbital Angular Momentum [SOLUTIONS]
• 2014/03/20: Homework 3: Spin and Addition of Angular Momentum [SOLUTIONS]
• 2014/03/27: Homework 4: Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
• 2014/04/01: Homework 5: Decay Angular Distributions
• 2014/04/03: Homework 6: TBD
• Final Exam

• Review of the Experimental Evidence for Spin
  • A brief refresher on classical orbital angular momentum
  • Atomic spectra of alkali metals
  • The Stern-Gerlach Experiment
  • Importance of spin angular momentum in modern physics: the Higgs boson
  • The need for a description of spin angular momentum
• The Mathematical Description of Spin
  • Linear Vector Spaces
  • Spinors
  • The Pauli Spin Matrices
  • Exercises in Linear Vector Spaces
• Non-Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
  • The Schroedinger Wave Equation
  • The Wave Function
  • One Spin-1/2 Particle
  • Multi-particle systems and addition of spin angular momentum
  • Addition of total angular momentum
• Relativistic Quantum Mechanics
  • The Relativistic Wave Equation
  • Spin and the Wave Function
  • Helicity Formalism
• Spin and the Higgs Boson
  • Models of angular distributions for different spin hypotheses
  • Simulated distributions of angular quantities
  • Experimental distributions of angular quantities
  • Determining the spin of the Higgs candidate