Chemistry 510
Advanced Physical Chemistry
last update for Spring 2008
instructor:
Andrew Cooksy, CSL-310, 594-5571
email: acooksy@sciences.sdsu.edu
Office Hours: Mon 11am-12:30pm and Wed,Fri 11-11:30am; CSL-310.
Example sessions: Mon 5-6pm, GMCS-214.
text:
CHEM 410A reader, on sale at Aztec Bookstore for $22.50.
CHEM 410A Course Syllabus
Additional CHEM 510 Syllabus Information
Current Course Calendar
Downloads
(login and password the same as for the
the Ch. 0 download, and will be given in lecture).
Recommended review problems
Corrections to the text
Announcements
Please also see the CHEM 410A announcements.
-
QUIZ 6
is scheduled for
Monday, April 21 from 10:00 to 10:10 am.
EXAM 6
is scheduled for
Wednesday, April 23 from 10:00 to 10:20 am.
The quiz and exam will cover Chapter 7 (vibrational symmetry
representations), Chapters 8 and 9 (skipping sections 8.3.2, 9.2),
and Chapter 10 (to p. 452, skipping cluster ions and metal clusters).
Topics likely to be covered on the quiz and/or exam include determining
vibrational symmetry, and using the rotational constants in Table 8.1.
Your best 4 scores on the 5 exam problems will be added for your total
exam score.
The exam guidelines are outlined in the Course Syllabus.
(Disclaimers:
The reading covers some material not presented in lecture, and the lectures
may cover points not included in the reading. Only the material actually
discussed in lecture is considered fair game for the quiz and exam problems.
Although exam and quiz problems focus on the material from the preceding two
weeks of lecture, solutions may require the use of material from earlier
in the course or from prerequisite courses.)
-
P-Chem texts on reserve:
Here's my run-down on these texts, which should be on reserve at Love Library:
- Atkins, Elements of P. Chem.
This text is written for a 1-semester, non-calculus course,
so it doesn't cover any of the material in the same depth that
we do, and some topics are omitted completely, but it may be
useful for a faster and easier overview of our topics.
(And no, we don't offer that course here.)
At least one of your classmates has looked at this and recommends it
highly because it can offer a big-picture summary of what we cover.
- Noggle, Physical Chemistry.
Noggle's is the only book I ever used for the course.
I think it's very well written, and reads more smoothly
than most other p-chem books. The topics are out of order,
from my perspective, so what we cover in 410A is in
the second half of the book, and most of our 410B material is
in the first half of the book.
- Berry, Rice, Ross, Physical Chemistry.
This is a huge book, originally published in 3 volumes for
the schools that had a p-chem course offered over 3 quarters.
It's got just about everything in it, so if you're just looking
for another perspective on one topic, this may be a good choice.
In some places it's more advanced than our course.
Generally speaking, the topics are organized in the same manner as in my course.
- McQuarrie and Simon, Physical Chemistry.
Similar comments as for Berry, Rice, and Ross, but this is a
slightly shorter text. One of the authors, McQuarrie, has written an
excellent Statistical Mechanics text for graduate students,
so you should find this text authoritative (but not necessarily easy)
on that subject.
- Then there are texts I don't know as well by Woodbury and by Levine.
These are more similar to Noggle's book in organization, and Levine's
was one of the more popular books when it was current.
-
Plots of the atomic orbitals
from 1s up to 4f are available.
Additional CHEM 510 Syllabus Information
CHEM 510 is offered primarily for graduate students who need additional
preparation in physical chemistry before pursuing advanced graduate courses.
This course is not normally open to undergraduate
chemistry and biochemistry majors, because the CHEM 410A lab is
prerequisite to CHEM 457 and CHEM 417. CHEM 510 adheres to the
CHEM 410A course syllabus with these two exceptions:
- There is no lab component to CHEM 510, which is why 510 is a 3-unit course
and 410A is a 4-unit course.
- To make CHEM 510 a more advanced course than CHEM 410A, students in 510
are required to present an oral analysis of a current research paper
relevant both to the student's area of research interest and to the
410A course material (e.g., spectrosopy, fundamental quantum mechanics,
molecular symmetry, classical bond analysis, computational chemistry).
Paper presentation:
The paper must be approved in advance by the instructor;
the instructor will try to find suitable papers if requested.
Presentations will be given outside regular class time, at a
time and date agreed to by the 510 instructor and students,
no later than the week of final exams. Each presentation should
be 15 to 20 minutes long, with additional time for questions.
Presentations may use the board, overhead projector (anyone still using
those?) and/or PowerPoint. They will be graded based on the student's
knowledge of the work, critical assessment, and clarity of presentation.
These presentations may be added to the Department's Journal Club
seminar listing, when the Journal Club is active (so some of our
other graduate students may wish to attend).
Grading:
CHEM 410A lecture assignments (drills, quizzes, and exams) will be
graded on the same scale as given in the 410A syllabus. The total
410A score will then be scaled by 80%.
The paper presentation will then count for the remaining 20% of the
final grade in CHEM 510.
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Last modified: April 14 2008 05:44:23.
