Modern Physics: for Scientists and Engineers

Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers provides an introduction to the fundamental concepts of modern physics and to the various fields of contemporary physics. The book's main goal is to help prepare engineering students for the upper division courses on devices they will later take, and to provide physics majors and engineering students an up-to-date description of contemporary physics. The book begins with a review of the basic properties of particles and waves from the vantage point of classical physics, followed by an overview of the important ideas of new quantum theory. It describes experiments that help characterize the ways in which radiation interacts with matter. Later chapters deal with particular fields of modern physics. These include includes an account of the ideas and the technical developments that led to the ruby and helium-neon lasers, and a modern description of laser cooling and trapping of atoms. The treatment of condensed matter physics is followed by two chapters devoted to semiconductors that conclude with a phenomenological description of the semiconductor laser. Relativity and particle physics are then treated together, followed by a discussion of Feynman diagrams and particle physics.

Table of Contents:
1. The Wave-Particle Duality2. The Schrodinger Wave Equation3. Operators and Waves4. Hydrogen Aton5. Many-Electron Atoms6. The Emergence of Masers and Lasers7. Statistical Physics8. Electronic Structure of Solids9. Charge Carriers in Semiconductors10. Semiconductor Lasers11. Relativity I12. Relativity II13. Particles Physics14. Nuclear PhysicsAppendix A: Natural Constants and Conversion ConstantsAppendix B: Table of Atomic MassesAppendix C: Solution of the Oscillator EquationAppendix D: The Average Value of the MomentumAppendix E: The Hartree-Fock AppletAppendix F: Integrals that Arise in Statistical PhysicsAppendix G: The ABINIT Applet

About the Author :
John Morrison received a BS degree in Physics from University of Santa Clara in California. During his undergraduate years, he majored in English, Philosophy, and Physics and served as the editor of the campus literary magazine, the Owl. Enrolling at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland, he received a PhD degree in theoretical Physics and moved on to postdoctoral research at Argonne National Laboratory where he was a member of the Heavy Atom Group. He then went to Sweden where he received a grant from the Swedish Research Council to build up a research group in theoretical atomic physics at Chalmers Technical University in Goteborg, Sweden. Working together with Ingvar Lindgren, he taught a graduate level-course in theoretical atomic physics for a number of years. Their teaching lead to the publication of the monograph, Atomic Many-Body Theory, which first appeared as Volume 13 of the Springer Series on Chemical Physics. The second edition of this book has become a Springer classic. Returning to the United States, John Morrison obtained a position in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at University of Louisville where he has taught courses in elementary physics, astronomy, modern physics, and quantum mechanics. In recent years, he has traveled extensively in Latin America and the Middle East maintaining contacts with scientists and mathematicians at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem and the Technion University in Haifa. During the Fall semester of 2009, he taught a course on computational physics at Birzeit University near Ramallah on the West Bank, and he has recruited Palestinian students for the graduate program in physics at University of Louisville. He speaks English, Swedish, and Spanish, and he is currently studying Arabic and Hebrew.