After the absences and family obligations of the past few weeks, I am looking forward to a stable and smooth rest of the semester. I should be available in my office for homework help much more often and encourage folks to come by at any time.
All posts by John Donoghue
Tuesday availability
I will try hard to be available between 1:15 and 3:30 on Tuesday Sept 16. I may be available in the morning, but the family medical problem may also make that impossible. I am sorry for the limited availability.
Second homework set
Here is the second homework set. This is more typical of Jackson problems than was the first set.
Calendar
Here is another link to my Google calendar . The link can also be found on my regular web page, but maybe it is more convenient here. You can use this to find out times that I will be out of the office. As I mentioned in class, I maintain an open door policy and am happy to talk to students whenever I am available.
First homework set
Here is the first homework set. I plan to have the HWs due on Tuesdays, in order to space them from the P615 assignments due on Fridays.
Physics 606 – Classical Electrodynamics
This fall I am teaching E&M for graduate students, using the classic text by Jackson. This is a challenging but satisfying course. Here is the syllabus . I will use these posts as a course web site.
Back From Zurich
I have had the pleasure of spending 10 weeks at the Universitat Zuerich. Hopefully I will soon be able to report on the results from that visit. I worked with Daniel Wyler on the Regge region in SCET and on the vectorial standard model. Both are interesting and hopefully important. I am now back at UMass.
Luca Grisa
We are pleased that Luca Grisa will be joining our theory group this fall as a postdoctoral research associate. Luca is working on some fascinating research topics. His papers can be found here
Spring semester
This spring I have a research leave from teaching. I am still supervising grad students, administering our grant and doing departmental service. However, my main focus is on developing a new research program on emergent theories, and the extra time is extremely valuable in allowing this to happen. I will be on leave at the University of Zurich from March 11 until May 16. I can still be contacted by my usual email during this period.
At the moment, I expect to be in Amherst all summer.
My anthropic paper with Thibault Damour
Here is my most recent paper.
In this paper, Thibault and I study the range of masses for light quarks that leads to nuclear binding. There are two calculations involved, which are used to provide estimates for how nuclear binding depends on quark masses.
The quark masses enter the Standard Model as parameters that are not fixed by any principle. It turns out that if they were slightly different, nuclei would not bind and there would be no atoms, and then no life. If we eventually learn that there is indeed a principle that fixes the quark masses, then this observation is just a bit of amusement. However, it is also possible that the mass parameters may not be fixed uniquely and could be different in different parts of the Universe. In that case, we would only find ourselves in the part of the Universe where the masses fall into the anthropically allowed range. In such theories the anthropic bounds could then play a role in determining the values of the masses.