Planning your time

The 'estimated time on task' for each assessment item is an estimate of the additional time needed to complete each assessment outside of all scheduled learning activities. These estimates assume that you actively engage with all scheduled learning activities and spend an additional 31 hours of self-led study during the session. If you receive special consideration for the final exam, a supplementary exam will be scheduled after the end of the normal exam period. By making a special consideration application for the final exam you are declaring yourself available for a resit during the supplementary examination period and will not be eligible for a second special consideration approval based on pre-existing commitments. Please ensure you are familiar with the policy prior to submitting an application. Approved applicants will receive an individual notification one week prior to the exam with the exact date and time of their supplementary examination.

Requirements to Pass the Unit

There are no hurdle tasks specified in this unit. Consequently, the requirement to pass is to obtain an overall mark of at least 50% across the three assessment components.

Late Assessment Submission Penalty

Unless a Special Consideration request has been submitted and approved, a 5% penalty (of the total possible mark of the task) will be applied for each day a written assignment or laboratory report is not submitted, up until the 7th day (including weekends and holidays). After the 7th day, a grade of 0 will be awarded even if the assessment is submitted. The submission time for all uploaded assessments is 11:55 pm. A 1-hour grace period will be provided to students who experience a technical concern. For any late submission of time-sensitive tasks, such as scheduled tests/exams, and/or scheduled labs, please apply for Special Consideration.

Specific assessment information regarding lab experiments and reports

Students will have to conduct four out of the following experiments available in the practical part of PHYS3180:

• Debye Temperature
• X-ray Diffraction
• Properties of Semiconductors
• Nuclear Magnetic Resonance
• Superconductors 
• Confocal Microscopy of Nanoemitters

Please note the following points

1. You are required to complete four of the experiments.
2. Students should make a booking for two lab sessions for each experiment they undertake. A booking gives priority provided the students arrive punctually at the start of the laboratory session.
3. A set of resources folder is available for each project which can be downloaded from iLearn.
4. You should refer to the document Recommendations for Laboratory Report Writing when preparing reports. Please ensure that your reports conform to these guidelines, and feel free to discuss this with any of the staff. You are required to write reports for two of the four experiments, one for experiment 1 or 2, and one for experiment 3 or 4.
5. Reports should not contain text that has been copied from the instructional notes. You should provide background and discussion material in your own words. It is expected that you produce your own original figures wherever possible, either hand-drawn or computer-generated. Anything taken from another source must be clearly acknowledged.
6. Besides two formal reports, you are required to write extensive (Python-based) electronic lab notes that provide the base for the lab report writing. After each 2-week experimental session, the electronic lab notes will be pulled and assessed (worth half of the total lab mark, that is 15% in total). The lab notes should reflect the in-class prac work.

Special Consideration

The Special Consideration Policy aims to support students who have been impacted by short-term circumstances or events that are serious, unavoidable and significantly disruptive, and which may affect their performance in assessment. If you experience circumstances or events that affect your ability to complete the written assessments in this unit on time, please inform the convenor and submit a Special Consideration request through https://connect.mq.edu.au 

Textbooks

Reference book covering weeks 1-7: • Concepts in Thermal Physics, 2nd edition, by S.J. & K.M. Blundell

Required textbook covering weeks 8-13: • Oxford Solid State Basics, by Steven H. Simon.

Note: Lecture materials, additional reading and assignments will be posted to iLearn

Communication

We will communicate with you via your university email or through announcements on iLearn. Queries to convenors can either be placed on the iLearn discussion board or sent from your university email address to your lecturers via their email addresses.

Lectures and problem-solving classes start in week 1. Labs start in week 2 but please review the lab safety information and complete the quiz before showing up to the lab in week 2. 

Lectures

• week 1: Macrostates and microstates, thermodynamic equilibrium, the equilibrium state, and the zeroth law
• week 2: State and path variables; work, heat and the first law
• week 3: Ideal gas processes and heat capacity
• week 4: The second law, reversibility and engines
• week 5: Principles of statistical mechanics and the Boltzmann distribution
• week 6: Free energy and the partition function; 
• week 7: Planck distribution
• week 8: Electron transport in solids, Drude model
• week 9: Sommerfeld theory of electrons
• week 10: 1D solid: phonons and electrons
• week 11: Crystal Structure & Reciprocal Lattice
• week 12: Wave Scattering by crystals
• week 13: Electrons in solids – bandstructure 

Note: The division by week and topics is approximate and will change depending on progress.

Lab schedule (location 14SCO 252)

• week 1: free week
• week 2: experiment 1 
• week 3: experiment 1
• week 4: experiment 2
• week 5: free week
• week 6: experiment 2 
• week 7: experiment 3 
• week 8: experiment 3
• week 9: free week
• week 10: experiment 4
• week 11: experiment 4
• week 12: free week
• week 13: no experiments.

The order of the main lecture topics has been reversed, in response to student feedback from the 2024 class. Thermodynamics is first, followed by Condensed Matter.