Waves                                                         (Hebrew: html, Word)

Prof. Benjamin Svetitsky

Mr. Shmuel Marcovitch

• Lecture:
  Sunday 8–10 (!) in Lev Auditorium
  Thursday 3–4 in Lecture Hall 6
• Exercise session:
  Monday 9–10 in Lecture Hall 7, or
  Monday 5–6 in Shenkar 104
  

For lecture notes, exercises, past exams, and more material see the school's Web site and Virtual.tau. The course mailing list is here.

Syllabus

• Harmonic oscillator: Free, damped, forced.
  
• Coupled oscillators: normal modes, normal coordinates.
  
• Vibrations in a string: traveling waves, reflection and transmission, standing waves.
  
• Longitudinal waves: sound waves. Transmission lines.
  
• Fourier series.  Wave packets and Fourier transform.
  
• Dispersion: group velocity, dispersion relations, cutoff frequency, evanescent (exponential) waves, tunneling.
  
• Water waves: surface tension waves, gravity waves, deep and shallow water limits.
  
• Waves in 3 dimensions: Transmission and reflection at a boundary, Snell's law, total reflection, tunneling.
• Electromagnetic waves: Maxwell's equations in a dielectric medium, index of refraction.  Polarization phenomena. Poynting vector, impedance. EM waves in a conducting medium.
  
• Fresnel's equations, Brewster's angle, Thomson and Rayleigh scattering.
  
• Standing waves in 3 dimensions: normal modes, blackbody spectrum.
  
• Geometrical optics: Cameras, detectors of EM radiation.
  
• Interference and diffraction: Young's experiment, diffraction grating, spectral resolution, angular resolution. Coherence.

Texts:

• I. G. Main, Vibrations and Waves in Physics
  
• F. S. Crawford, Berkeley Physics Course Vol. 3: Waves
  
• More material at Virtual.tau

Other recommended books: 

• H. J. Pain, The Physics of Vibrations and Waves
• A. P. French, Vibrations and Waves
  
• M. Alonso and E. J. Finn, Fundamental University Physics, Vol. 2
• H. Georgi, Vibrations and Waves