A. Explore a special topic, give in-class presentation

For projects leading to an in-class presentation, please form teams of up to three students. Each presentation topic can be selected only once. Your work should result in a 20 to 25 minute talk explaining the topic to your fellow students. The talks are scheduled for the last week of classes, i.e., for May 4 to May 8, 2026.

1.

Real gases, van-der-Waals equation, and the liquid-gas transition
Textbook (Blundell+Blundell), chapters 26, 27, parts of 28
Goldenfield, Lectures on phase transitions and the renormalization group, Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1992, chapter 4 (instructor has copy)

2.

Bose-Einstein condensation of atomic gases
E.A. Cornell and C.E. Wieman, Nobel Lecture, Rev. Mod. Phys. 74, 875 (2002)
J.R. Anglin and W. Ketterle, Bose-Einstein condensation of atomic gases, Nature 416, 211 (2002)
W. Ketterle, Experimental studies of Bose-Einstein condensation in a gas, Physics Today, Dec 1999, p30-35
K. Burnett et al., The theory of Bose-Einstein condensation of dilute gases, Physics Today, Dec 1999, p37-42
C.J. Pethick and H. Smith, Bose-Einstein condensation of dilute gases, Cambridge University Press, 2002

3.

Superfluid liquid helium
T. Guenault, Basic superfluids, Taylor and Francis, London, 2003, chapters 1 and 2
A.J. Leggett, Quantum Liquids, Oxford University Press, 2006, chapter 3

4.

Thermodynamics of Earth’s atmosphere
Textbook (Blundell+Blundell), chapter 37
Material on the 2021 Physics Nobel Prize on nobelprize.org

5.

White dwarf stars and neutron stars
Textbook (Blundell+Blundell), chapters 35 and 36
S.A. Kaplan, The Physics of stars, Wiley, Chichester, 1982, chapters 5 and 6 (instructor has copy)
R.K. Pathria, Statistical Mechanics, Butterworth-Heinemann, Oxford, 1996, section 8.4
Lecture 29 of David Boal’s Astrophysics course, https://www.sfu.ca/$\sim$boal/390.html

B. Computer simulation projects, could lead to presentation or term paper

1.

Molecular dynamics simulation using Daniel Schroeder’s HTML5 applet
(does not require coding)
https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/md/
see article in American Journal of Physics 83 (3), 210-218 (2015),
https://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/md/InteractiveMD.pdf

2.

Monte-Carlo simulations of a two-dimensional Ising model
(does require coding) $\bullet$ K. P. N. Murthy, An Introduction to Monte Carlo Simulation of Statistical Physics Problems, https://arxiv.org/abs/cond-mat/0104167
$\bullet$ M.E.J. Newman and G.T. Barkema Monte Carlo Methods in Statistical Physics, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1999, chapters 2, 3
$\bullet$ N. Giordano, Computational Physics, Prentice Hall, Upper Saddle River, 1997, sections 8.3, 8.4