The course consists of 48 hours: 36 hours of theory and 12 hours of exercises. The main topics of the course are:
Second quantization of the electromagnetic field
Quantization of the electromagnetic field. Fock states and coherent states of the electromagnetic field. Electromagnetic field at finite temperature. Casimir effect.
Electromagnetic transitions
Atom in the presence of the electromagnetic field. Fermi golden rule. Dipole approximation. Absorption, stimulated and spontaneus emission of radiation: Einstein coefficients. Selection rules. Lifetime of atomic states and linewidths. Population inversion and laser light.
The Spin of the Electron
Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations. The Pauli equation and the spin. Dirac equation with a central potential. Relativistic hydrogen atom and fine splitting.
Atoms with many electrons and quantum many-body theory
Variational principle. Hartree-Fock variational methods for bosons and fermions. Density functional theory.
Quantum Schrodinger field
Field operators for bosons and fermions. Fock and coherent states of the bosonic field operator. Schrodinger field at finite temperature. Matter field for interacting bosons and fermions. Bosons in a double-well potential and the two-site Bose-Hubbard model.
- Docente: Luca Salasnich
