PHYS 101: Energy and Waves

Overview

Fluids, harmonic oscillator, travelling waves, standing waves, sound, and interference of light waves, including diffraction.

Topics

• FLUIDS: pressure of gases, hydrostatic pressure in liquids, gauge pressure, Pascal's Principle, basic hydraulic systems, buoyancy, Archimedes' principle, Bernoulli's equation
• CIRCULAR MOTION & SIMPLE HARMONIC MOTION: properties of oscillatory motion, graphing oscillations as displacement/velocity/acceleration vs. time, equations for displacement, velocity, and acceleration for SHM, phase and phase constant, Hooke's law, elastic potential energy for a spring/mass system, conservation of energy, natural frequency, horizontal and vertical oscillations, simple pendulum, damped SHM, resonance, Extend the idea of stress/strain to spring systems, Young's modulus, bulk modulus.
• WAVES: longitudinal and transverse waves, snapshot and history graphs, properties of a wave, wave speed vs particle speed, sound waves, power and intensity, decibel system, Doppler effect, superposition, standing waves, interference in two systems, constructive and destructive interference, beats, sound interference, light interference, Young's double slit, thin film interference, diffraction grating, circular aperture, Rayleigh criterion

Resources Available

• Learning Goals and Schedule - PDF
• Worksheets for in-class activities - zip of Word documents
• Assignments/Homework - zip of PDF and Word versions