The main teaching mechanism on this course is through activities and exercises. Each unit is composed of a number of such activities which will not only introduce the material to you but also enable you to demonstrate your understanding (or to express your lack of understanding – something you should never be afraid to do).
There are several kinds of activity that you will be asked to complete while on this course. Some of these will be ongoing throughout the course, whereas others will relate to the topic of a particular week. Activity types include:
Reading: Doing this lets you explore the content of the course. Usually you will receive guidance about things you should be considering as you do the reading to help you get the most from it.
Individual activities: These will help you to consolidate the learning from your reading and further explore the ideas in the course. Much of the work you undertake on your own will feed into your assignments.
The activities are broken up into the following two categories:
Walkthroughs: In each of these, you will be taken through an application of MATLAB. You should type all commands given into the MATLAB command window as you work your way through the activity.
Problems: You will be given a problem to solve using MATLAB (and, very occasionally, pen and paper). This will require the creation of a figure or the development of an appropriate MATLAB function. Hints and solutions will be given.
The work you do for many of the exercises on this course will be directly useful in the assignment, which will therefore be much less onerous if you have completed the activities as you go along.
Code will be written in typewriter font, this for example, and you should type these commands into the MATLAB command window when you see them, to see what they do.
Longer code blocks will appear like this:
b=ones(500,1);
tic, x1=A\b; toc
tic, x2=B\b; toc
Mathematics will be presented in maths font, i.e. $\Psi(\mathbf{r},t)$, and longer equations may appear on on their own line, such as:
$$i\hbar\frac{\partial}{\partial t} \Psi(\mathbf{r},t) = \left [ \frac{-\hbar^2}{2\mu}\nabla^2 + V(\mathbf{r},t)\right ] \Psi(\mathbf{r},t).$$