INSTRUCTORS: Richard Scalettar, Shirley Chiang, Gary Slizeski

GENERAL DESCRIPTION:
The laws that govern the motion of small objects, for example electrons in a solid, are fundamentally different from the familiar laws that Newton discovered. Not only are they different, but they are often counterintuitive. One cannot know the precise location of objects! Certain configurations are forbidden- a spinning molecule can have some angular orientations but not others! Only restricted sets of energy levels are allowed. To understand modern electronics we need to master these unfamiliar and strange laws and their consequences. This is the goal of our cluster. There are some technical things we need to learn along the way: the linux operating system of the computers we will be using and how to write programs in C. We won't assume students know too much about these things, so we'll do a lot of simple, but interesting warm-up programs before tackling our quantum physics projects.