Physics 130C Lecture Notes Chapter 3: Applications to condensed matter and to particle physics

3.1 Harmonic oscillator review, operator solution . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-2 3.1.1 Coherent states . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-3 3.2 Towards quantized fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-3 3.2.1 Quantum sound: Phonons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-3 3.2.2 Quantum light: Photons . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-15 3.3 Casimir effect: vacuum energy is real . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-20 3.4 Identical particles: Bosons and fermions . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-24 3.4.1 Band structure: metals and insulators . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-25 3.5 Particles in electromagnetic fields . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-31 3.5.1 Landau levels . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-31 3.5.2 Aharonov-Bohm effect . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3-31 The purpose of this (final) chapter of 130C is to discover the quantum theory of fields. So far, we’ve been discussing the quantum theory of particles, where the number of particles