Hanbury Brown cohort
Contents
Physics class 2017-2018-2019
The year 2017 was our first edition of a Physics Course in Wolverhampton, no doubt a historical event for the University. It welcomed people who like to build and be part of something in the making from the very beginning and keep doing so!
This page contains all the useful information relating to the 2018-2019 edition.
Robert Hanbury Brown
The 2017-2018 cohort is named after Robert Hanbury Brown, the British astronomer and physicist who proposed in the 50s' and experimentally confirmed the Hanbury Brown-Twiss effect, of correlations between photons. This great insight from an essentially unknown scientist (in fact, engineer) has been widely criticised by mainstream physicists when first announced, before its eventual recognition as a fundamental feature of the light-wave interpretation of nature, which gave birth to quantum optics. This is how he reminds the reaction from transposing to photons a demonstrated behaviour of light waves:
- Now, to a surprising number of people, this idea [of photon correlations] seemed not only heretical but patently absurd and they told us so in person, by letter, in publications, and by actually doing experiments which claimed to show that we were wrong. At the most basic level they asked how, if photons are emitted at random in a thermal source, can they appear in pairs at two detectors? At a more sophisticated level the enraged physicist would brandish some sacred text, usually by Heitler, and point out that the number $n$ of quanta in a beam of radiation and its phase $\phi$ are represented by non-commuting operators and that our analysis was invalidated by the uncertainty relation $\delta n\times\delta\phi\approx1$.
Course rep
The "course rep" for the course of Physics is Chloe Allen-Ede. You can contact her at C.Allen-Ede@wlv.ac.uk.
2017
Welcome week
Academic calendar
Semester 1
In pdf:
Semester 2
You can download them in pdf form:
2O18
Semester 1
- Electromagnetism II by Prof. F.P. Laussy (Lectures & labs) & J.C. López Carreño (Tutorials & labs).
- Solid State Physics by J.C. López Carreño (Lectures & tutorials) and Prof. F. P. Laussy (labs).
- Mathematical Methods by Prof. F.P. Laussy (Lectures) & J.C. López Carreño (Tutorials).
Semester 2
- Thermodynamics and Statistical Physics, by Prof. F.P. Laussy (Lectures & labs) & J.C. López Carreño (Tutorials & labs).
- Quantum Physics, by Prof. F.P. Laussy (Lectures & labs) & J.C. López Carreño (Tutorials & labs).
- Numerical Methods, Dr. A. Gascoyne.