Noah Graham

Assistant Professor of Physics and Junior Faculty Fellow, Middlebury College

McCardell Bicentennial Hall, with telescope and cooling fan

Contact info:

Department of Physics
McCardell Bicentennial Hall
Middlebury College
Middlebury, VT 05753

Phone: (802) 443-3423
Fax: (802) 443-2072

email: ngraham [at] middlebury [dot] edu

Education:

Research:

My research centers around applications of quantum mechanics and classical and quantum field theory to a variety of problems in elementary particle physics, physics of solitons and oscillons, and the Casimir effect. I am also interested in applications of physics techniques to applications in computer science. Here are some possible thesis topics on these subjects, or you can read my fascinating papers.)

Here is some code that does a lattice simulation of oscillons in the electroweak Standard Model, as shown in this paper and this paper. It includes SU(2)xU(1) gauge fields and a fundamental Higgs field. It has been adapted to a number of other situations, including SU(2) adjoint gauge fields, abelian Higgs models, and expanding universe backgrounds -- please contact me if you are interested in the details.
All contents of this package are copyright © Noah Graham, 2006-2007, all rights reserved. This program may be used and modified for noncommercial research purposes, provided that citation to N. Graham, hep-th/0610267, "An Electroweak Oscillon," Phys. Rev. Lett. 98 (2007) 101801 and/or N. Graham, arXiv:0706.4125 [hep-th], "Numerical Simulation of an Electroweak Oscillon," Phys. Rev. D 76 (2007) 085017 or equivalent is included in all publications or other products in which the program or any programs derived from it were used. This program and all accompanying materials are provided "AS IS," WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EITHER EXPRESSED OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING, BUT NOT LIMITED TO, THE IMPLIED WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY AND FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

I gratefully acknowledge the National Science Foundation, Research Corporation, Vermont EPSCoR, and Middlebury College for grants supporting my research.

Teaching:

Below are lessons on quantum mechanics I have developed for the course "Quantum Mechanics From a Linear Algebra Point of View." They assume knowledge of linear algebra (at the level of Strang's book, for example) and basic familiarity with introductory mechanics and electromagnetism. Rather than the usual wave-mechanics approach used in most textbooks and quantum mechanics courses (such as PH401), they use the more physically abstract but mathematically simpler picture of finite dimensional matrices. My hope is they can provide a complement to standard undergraduate quantum mechanics references such as Gasiorowicz, Griffiths, and Liboff. This approach is also more directly applicable to problems in quantum computing.

All materials are copyright © 2002-2007, Noah Graham. These materials may be used for noncommercial purposes with proper attribution, including this notice.

Lesson 1
Lesson 2
Lesson 3
Lesson 4
Lesson 5
Lesson 6
Lesson 7
Lesson 7 (advanced version)
Lesson 8
Lesson 9

Having worked in industry doing research in speech recognition, I am also interested in applications of scientific computing, both to physics and to subjects like speech and vision. Below are the first three projects from PH120, Computers in the Physical Sciences. These are designed to provide introductions to the applications of an object-oriented approach using Mathematica© and C++ to problems in the physical sciences. Other examples of computational assignments from PH301, Intermediate Electrodynamics, PH350, Statistical Mechanics, and PH401, Quantum Mechanics, are below as well.

All materials are copyright © 2002-2007, Noah Graham. These materials may be used for noncommercial purposes with proper attribution, including this notice.

Project 1
Project 2
Project 3
PH301 Project
PH350 Project
PH401 Project
Weybridge, VT