In the course
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10 videos · 3 h 53 min
Explainer · YouTube
Professor Dave Explains
A clear, beginner-paced walk through today's central calculation: set ψ to zero at both walls and watch the allowed energies appear. Pause when the n² shows up and predict what happens to the levels if the box shrinks.
Explainer · YouTube
Periodic Videos
A chemist's-eye view of the 2023 Nobel Prize in Chemistry: quantum dots, the particle in a box you can hold in a vial. Watch for how size alone, not composition, changes the colour.
Explainer · YouTube
Professor Dave Explains
The sequel to the briefing's Part 1: with the box solved, Professor Dave turns to what the solutions actually mean. Check what he says about the wavefunctions against section 3's rules: n − 1 interior nodes, a nonzero ground-state energy, and a probability density that never changes in time.
Explainer · YouTube
SciToons
A four-minute animated primer on section 6's headline fact: quantum dots are tiny crystals whose colour is controlled by their size. A gentle first look before the Nobel lecture; keep the 1/L² confinement energy in mind as the reason smaller means bluer.
Explainer · YouTube
Dot Physics
Physicist Rhett Allain starts from a Gaussian wave function in an infinite square well, writes it as a superposition of the box's stationary states and steps it forward in time in Python. It is section 5's two-state slosh with many components, the kind of packet section 7 says a real bouncing particle must be built from; a long, code-along session for the learner who wants to run it themselves.
Lecture · Yale
YaleCourses · Ramamurti Shankar · 2010
Ramamurti Shankar's Yale lecture (PHYS 201, recorded 2010) opens by reviewing how to predict energy measurements from a superposition, revisits the particle on a ring, and gives the particle in a box its full treatment from about the 19-minute mark to the 54-minute mark. The last quarter hour studies scattering, where a particle enters a classically forbidden region, a perfect bridge to the next chapter.
Lecture · MIT
MIT OpenCourseWare · Barton Zwiebach
In this MIT 8.04 segment Barton Zwiebach builds the box from the walls inward: why an infinite potential forces ψ = 0 outside, why continuity then pins ψ to zero at both walls, and why the cosine drops out. He carries straight on into section 2 (n = 0 gives no particle, negative n only flips the sign, and sine squared averaging to one half fixes the normalization); note that he calls the width a, not L.
Lecture · Stanford
David Miller Quantum Mechanics Courses · David A. B. Miller
Stanford's David Miller reads the box solutions as eigenvalues and eigenfunctions, notes their alternating even and odd parity, the zero-point energy and the extra node in each higher state, then switches to electron-volts for an order-of-magnitude check. His example, an electron in a 0.5 nm box with E₁ ≈ 1.5 eV and E₂ − E₁ ≈ 4.5 eV (the scale of atomic level spacings), is the lesson's rule of thumb exactly.
Lecture · Stanford
David Miller Quantum Mechanics Courses · David A. B. Miller
Miller puts the particle in an equal superposition of the first and second box states, gives each its own time factor exp(−iEₙt/ħ), and shows that the probability density gains a term oscillating at angular frequency (E₂ − E₁)/ħ = 3E₁/ħ. Watch for his point that only the energy difference matters, never where you set the zero of energy: section 5's sloshing, drawn step by step.
Lecture · Nobel Prize
Nobel Prize · Moungi Bawendi
Moungi Bawendi's Nobel lecture, "A Synthesis Born of Necessity Unlocks a Nano-World of Wonders" (8 December 2023), from the MIT chemist whose group learned to grow near-perfect dots of chosen size. Section 6's 1/L² confinement term explains why that control was the prize: any spread in size becomes a spread in colour.