First Final

That sounds paradoxical, but today I had my first final exam of the semester. It was on Quantum Mechanics.

As usual, time was the biggest factor. The exam consisted of 4 problems. The first problem was about coherent states. Given a coherent state \ket{\alpha} we were asked to find its normalization and expectation value of the square of the position and momentum variance. I am pretty sure it was not as long as I made it. It involves lots of creation and annihilation operator algebra. Very tedious for a timed exam. The second problem was to calculate the approximate energy eigenvalues given the potential using the WKB quantization condition. It was easy. I was a bit clueless for the third problem: two infinite solenoids, with opposing currents, and electron beams that passed in their vicinity. We had to compute the interference pattern for one path vs. the other path. Sadly, I did not read much on the Aharanov- Bohm effect, so I left it for the end and had no time to work on it. The last problem was our good old friend the infinite square-well, finding the propagator. It was a bit tricky, since I was a bit confused with the units of the energy levels. But I quickly re-derived everything and confirmed that my memory was right.

Should be well! I hope I pass this class, so I can start with the good stuff.