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| Instructor: | Josh Deutsch |
| email: | josh@physics.ucsc.edu |
| Office Hours: | Wednesday 1-3:00PM 219 ISB |
Polymer Physics 120/240 is a course offered once every other year as an introduction to this ubiquitous molecule. Synthetic polymers are what makes up plastics, gels, and glues. Biological polymers make up DNA, RNA, and proteins. So their role in science and technology is tremendous.
Not only that, but although polymers often appear quite goopy to the untrained eye, to us physicists they have very elegant properties owing to the self-similar behavior that they often exhibit. The self-similarity or "fractal" nature of polymeric systems makes it possible to understand systems of long polymer chains using scaling and other powerful yet intuitive theoretical approaches. These approaches have a lot of overlap with field theoretical techniques used in other branches of physics such as particle physics, yet has a more direct physical interpretation.
In this course, you'll learn about these concepts and also about computer simulations of such systems. In the past, students have done final projects, some of which have been exceptional. Last year one student's project was published in Physical Review Letters.
So for those analytically inclined, this provides an excellent opportunity to learn new mathematics and physics techniques. For those interested in computers, this course has proved very useful to improving programing skills including simulation and visualization. The languages that I encourage are C, C++, and Java.
The format of the course will depend on the number of students enrolled. In the past, typically around 10 students have enrolled, which has allowed for a lot of flexibility in the direction individual students could take.