Curt Wittig
I was born and raised in rough parts of Chicago, brought misery into the lives of my teachers, and caused my parents to age at a quickened rate. Happenstance got me into the University of Illinois at Chicago with a 2.4 / 4 GPA. Things like that used to happen every so often back then. After nearly failing out, I caught fire, moved to Urbana-Champaign, receiving a BS and then the PhD in electrical engineering (EE) in 1970. Postdocs (EE at USC, Physical Chemistry at Cambridge (UK) and Berkeley) were followed by a faculty appointment in 1973 at USC in EE. These were wild times. It is amazing things worked out as well as they did. I reached the rank of Professor in EE, Physics, and Chemistry in 1979. With interest in EE fading, I transferred to the Chemistry and Physics Departments in 1981, settling eventually in Chemistry. My research was and continues to be in Chemical Physics.
Notes Project
I have worked for over a decade on a set of notes that can prove useful in a range of pedagogical environments: classroom, seminars, tutorials, studying, etc. They are organized into five reasonably stand-alone Parts: I. Polyatomic Molecules; II. Complexity in Polyatomic Molecules; III. Miscellanea; IV. Phonons, Plasmons, Polaritons, and More; V. Introduction to Classical and Quantum Relativity.
Each Part consists of pdf files for each chapter. The chapters are reasonably self-contained and broken down into sections and subsections.
Part III, Miscellanea contains individual writeups that have proven useful: a course on graphene, lectures on cyclotron resonance, tutorials on vibronic interactions in pyrazine, a foray into quantum optics, etc. and topics that arise frequently such as Fermi’s Golden Rule and the Kramers-Kronig relations. Part III has just begun. I expect it to grow at a good pace during the first year and continue though at a reduced pace thereafter.
Part I - Polyatomic Molecules
I.1 Born-Oppenheimer Approximation and Nonadiabatic Coupling(87 pages)
I.2 Intersections (63 pages)
I.3 Conical Intersection (30 pages)
I.4 Landau-Zener Model (28 pages)
I.5 Geometric Phase (112 pages)
I.6 Electrodynamics Miscellanea (66 pages)
Part II - Complexity in Polyatomic Molecules
II.1 Couplings Among Bound States (55 pages)
II.2 Effective Hamiltonians (70 pages)
II.3 Resonances in One Dimension (91 pages)
II.4 Unimolecular Reactions (91 pages)
II.5 Couplings Between Discrete Sates and Continua (77 pages)
Part III - Miscellanea (work in progress)
- Kramers-Kronig Relation
- Fermi’s Golden Rule
- Classical and Mathematical Origins of Quantum
- Classical Oscillators
- Graphene, Cyclotron Resonance
- Vibronic Interactions
- Quantum Optics
- etc.
Part IV
Part IV-A: Phonons, Plasmons, Polaritons, and More
IV-A.1. Particle-on-a Ring (25 pages)
IV-A.2. Transfer Matrices (20 pages)
IV-A.3. Hückel Model (24 pages)
IV-A.4. Infinite One-Dimensional Lattice (73 pages)
IV-A.5. Simple Molecular Orbital View (7 pages)
Part IV.B: Phonons, Plasmons, Polaritons & More
IV.B.1 Lattice Vibrations in One Dimension (54 pages)
IV.B.2. Heat Capacity and Thermal Conductivity (38 pages)
IV.B.3. Insulators, Metals, and Semiconductors (45 pages)
IV.B.4. Plasmas in Metals and Semiconductors (62 pages)
IV.B.5. Nanoscale Plasmas (25 pages)
IV.B.6. Phonon Polariton (28 pages)
IV.B.7. Plasmon Polariton (24 pages)
IV.B.8. Continuous Fields, Time Dependence, Infinite 3D (18 pages)
IV.B.9. Extension to Covariant Field Theory (11 pages)
IV.B Appendices (40 pages)
Part V - Introduction to Classical and Quantum Relativity
V.1. Classical Special Relativity of Material Objects (116 pages)
V.2. Electrodynamics (70 pages)
V.3. Aharonov-Bohm Effect and Geometric Phase (58 pages)
V.4. Introduction to Relativistic Quantum Mechanics (84 pages)
Appendices (84 pages)