Daniel V. Schroeder Home Page

Daniel V. Schroeder

Department of Physics and Astronomy
Weber State University
1415 Edvalson Street, Dept. 2508
Ogden, UT 84408-2508
USA
Office: Tracy Hall Science Center 322
Phone: (801) 626-6048 (messages are checked infrequently)
email:

Biography

I was born in St. Louis, Missouri, and grew up in the suburb of Webster Groves. From 1980-84 I attended Carleton College, and from 1984-90 I was a graduate student at Stanford University, where I spent most of my time at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Center. I taught physics at Pomona College for one year and at Grinnell College for two years before coming to Weber State in 1993.

Course web pages

Physics 1040, Introduction to Astronomy
Honors 1500, Perspectives in the Physical Sciences, “Energy, Entropy, and Everything”
Honors 1500, Perspectives in the Physical Sciences, “Deep Space and Deep Time”
Physics 2010, General Physics I
Physics 2210, Physics for Scientists and Engineers I
Physics 2220, Physics for Scientists and Engineers II
Physics 2300, Scientific Computing
Physics 2710, Introductory Modern Physics
Physics 3180, Thermal Physics
Physics 3510, Electromagnetic Theory
Physics 3540, Mechanical and Electromagnetic Waves
Physics 4610, Quantum Mechanics

Research interests

My research in high-energy physics has been mainly on beam-beam interactions at future linear colliders. I have supervised a variety of undergraduate student projects in theoretical and computational physics, and am always interested in talking with students about new projects.

Books

An Introduction to Quantum Field Theory, by Michael E. Peskin and Daniel V. Schroeder, Addison-Wesley (now CRC Press), 1995. (This book is full of errors.)
An Introduction to Thermal Physics, Addison-Wesley (now Pearson), 1999.
Physics Simulations in Java (unpublished, 2011) and Physics Simulations in Python (unpublished, 2018) are two versions of a lab manual that I wrote for our Scientific Computing course.
Notes on Quantum Mechanics (unpublished, 2022) is a draft textbook for a one-semester undergraduate course in Quantum Mechanics.

Articles

Review of Energy and Human Ambitions on a Finite Planet by Tom Murphy, American Journal of Physics 89, 897-898 (2021). PDF preprint with added endnotes.
Kevin Randles, Daniel V. Schroeder, and Bruce Thomas, “Quantum matrix diagonalization visualized,” Am. J. Phys. 87 (11), 857-861 (2019), arXiv:1905.13269 [physics.ed-ph]. Click here to run the related web app.
Daniel V. Schroeder, “Entanglement isn’t just for spin,” Am. J. Phys. 85 (11), 812-820 (2017), arXiv:1703.10620 [physics.ed-ph]. PDF of published version. I have also posted two slide sets that cover much of the same material, from presentations given at the 2016 and 2017 summer meetings of the AAPT.
Daniel V. Schroeder, “The variational-relaxation algorithm for finding quantum bound states,” Am. J. Phys. 85 (9), 698-704 (2017), arXiv:1701.08934 [physics.comp-ph]. PDF of published version.
Daniel V. Schroeder, “Interactive molecular dynamics,” Am. J. Phys. 83 (3), 210-218 (2015), arXiv:1502.06169 [physics.ed-ph]. PDF of published version. Click here to run the web app.
Review of Atmospheric Thermodynamics by Craig F. Bohren and Bruce A. Albrecht, American Journal of Physics 68, 1159-1160 (2000). PDF reprint.
Thomas A. Moore and Daniel V. Schroeder, “A different approach to introducing statistical mechanics,” Am. J. Phys. 65 (1), 26-36 (1997), arXiv:1502.07051 [physics.ed-ph].
Daniel V. Schroeder, “Renormalization,” in the Macmillan Encyclopedia of Physics, Macmillan, New York, 1996.
Daniel V. Schroeder and Zu Xin Yu, “Fractional Luminosity Near Maximum Energy in the Presence of Beamstrahlung,” in Physics and Experiments with Linear e+e- Colliders, ed. F. A. Harris, et al., World Scientific, Singapore, 1993.
Daniel V. Schroeder and Thomas A. Moore, “A computer-simulated Stern-Gerlach laboratory,” Am. J. Phys. 61 (9), 798-805 (1993), arXiv:1502.07036 [physics.ed-ph].
P. Chen, T. Tauchi, and D. V. Schroeder, “Pair Creation at Large Inherent Angles,” in Research Directions for the Decade: Snowmass 1990, ed. E. L. Berger, World Scientific, Singapore, 1992.
Daniel V. Schroeder, Beamstrahlung and QED Backgrounds at Future Linear Colliders, Ph.D. Thesis, Stanford University, 1990 (SLAC-Report-371).

Other items of interest

Physics educational software
Relativity in Five Lessons (online mini-text)
Fluid dynamics simulations and related materials
Creating Interactive Web Simulations using HTML5 and JavaScript (online tutorial and examples, developed for an AAPT workshop given in 2014 and 2015)
Quantum Mechanics with Mathematica: A Tutorial for Instructors (23-page pdf, 2019)
Liberating undergraduate quantum mechanics through computation (21-minute video of talk for AAPT summer meeting, 2021)
Mathematica tutorial for physics students
Web Apps for Wavefunctions, Spins, and Entanglement (pdf) is a poster that I presented at the 2017 AAPT summer meeting.
Picturing Quantum Mechanics: 14 MB zip archive of a poster presentation from the 2016 AAPT summer meeting, with separate illustration files and Mathematica code. The illustrations and code (but not the completed poster) are in the public domain for unlimited reuse.
Energy First and Foremost in Physics 101 is a talk that I gave at the 2002 summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers.
Feynman Diagrams and Electron-Positron Annihilation is a set of curricular materials that I drafted a number of years ago.
At the 2000 summer meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers in Guelph, Ontario, I presented a talk titled “From Clouds to Cosmology: New and Old Applications of Thermal Physics.” Here is a pdf version of the handout that summarizes most of the talk.
The Undergraduate Thermal Physics Course: Who Should Take it and Why? is a talk that I gave at a conference of physics educators in June 2000.
Purcell Simplified: Magnetism, Radiation, and Relativity is a talk that I gave at the 1999 Winter Meeting of the American Association of Physics Teachers (Anaheim, CA, 14 January 1999).
My badly out-of-date review of star charting apps for iPhone and iPod Touch may have once been useful to those who owned one of these devices.
Long ago I produced an index for my favorite introductory sky observer's guidebook, 365 Starry Nights by Chet Raymo.
I’ve also written an informal paper discussing prices of physics textbooks, and a more recent update.
Guidelines for students seeking letters of recommendation
Utah Coronavirus Statistics (interactive charts and map)

Professional service

Consulting editor (2017-present), Associate editor (2012-2016), Book review editor (2003-2008), and Editorial Advisory Board member (1998-2000), American Journal of Physics.
President, Idaho-Utah Section, American Association of Physics Teachers, 2003-2004. In this capacity I organized the Section's 2003 annual meeting at WSU.

Here are some useful fun recommended links...

Last modified on 30 August 2022.