Recent content by Higgy

Right, I think this is resolved. Here is my solution. I would appreciate it if someone looked it over and confirmed that it is correct. Example: The ground state of ^{39} K is the 4s state. (i.) To calculate J, observe that an s state has L = 0 , and that the spin of the electron is S =...

(Note: I would have edited the OP, but it doesn't appear that I can do that. Please excuse the bump.) I found some significant mistakes in my original post. Eric Weisstein's World of Physics to the rescue! First, J cannot take negative values. That literally follows from something I stated...

Homework Statement I am to consider the Zeeman Effect. I need to calculate the energy level shifts for a given magnetic field corresponding to different quantum numbers. I'm having a hard time knowing when a quantum number Q should be interpreted as just Q or as (Q, Q-1, ..., 0, ..., -Q)...

So a processor is just a collection of millions of logic gates on a chip. Data is fed in, the gates transform it appropriately, and the result is outputted to the terminal, memory, whatever. Whether or not the CPU in my computer is just a collection of logic gates, and nothing else, is what...

Thanks for answering. Maybe my question is too elementary, but I mostly just want to know if the chip in my computer that's called the CPU is really just filled with logic gates. I've taken a college course in logic (philosophy dept.) and a college course in circuits (physics dept.) which...

I would like to know the basic design structure of computer processors. My concept of a processor is that it reads some binary data from memory, performs operations on it (according to a set of instructions, which it also reads in), and then writes the result to memory somewhere. (Is this...

Sorry, yes - photon. (What a strange, plasma-filled world we'd live in otherwise!) Great, thank you.

I've drawn up a simple system to help with my question. Suppose we prepare an atom in an excited state (| 4 \rangle in the figure), and it can spontaneously decay to the ground state (| 1 \rangle ) through either of two intermediate states (| 2 \rangle or | 3 \rangle ). Is the probability...

As I understand it, "nonradiative decay" of a system from an excited state to a lower-energy state is any type of decay that does not result in the emission of an electron. I can't think of any way that a free atom could decay without emitting a photon. Molecules, yes, (through...

I'm guessing that we're supposed to think of the rope as massless, since they don't say anything about the mass of the rope. Here's how I'm thinking about it. The mass feels a force downward of F=Mg. But it's in static equilibrium, since it's not moving. So it must be feeling a force upward...

Homework Statement A mass M hangs from a rope which is connected to a ceiling. The rope does not stretch. How much energy is stored in the mass-rope system? Homework Equations F_{g}=-mg=-Mg W=Fd The Attempt at a Solution I'm confused. The mass will have potential energy equal to mgh...

Right, that makes sense. Now my thinking is this: For a circuit with one voltage input and output (and, say, lots of op-amps in the middle, as is my circuit), the followers aren't necessary - except, perhaps, one at the beginning to act as a "buffer". So I think that many of the followers I...

I'm designing a circuit for experimental use. I'll make this as quick as possible. Browsing other circuit designs on the web, I initially noticed "followers" placed between other op-amp app's (adders, integrators, inverters, etc). From what I can tell, putting in followers like this must be...

The oscilloscope impedance is 1 M\Omega. Reverse biasing a photodiode gives it a faster response. The response time depends on the size of the capacitor and load resistor. I'd also guess that you could swap out the 9V battery for larger voltage sources, in which case the resistor would...

(please excuse the double post) Hmmm... I'm not using an "oscilloscope probe" as discussed in that article - I'm literally taking a BNC cable, plugging one end into the "output" of my photodiode circuit (as in the diagram above), and plugging the other end into "Input 1" of the scope. So no...