About the book
The second edition of Modern Physics for Scientists and Engineers is intended for a first course in modern physics following an introductory course in physics with calculus. With three chapters on atomic physics and lasers and four chapters on condensed matter physics and semiconductor devices, the book is intended to help engineering majors prepare for the upper division courses they will later take and provide physics majors an overview of contemporary physics as it is currently practiced. The second edition has new sections on graphene and carbon nanotubes as well as new sections on gauge invariance and the discovery of the Higgs boson. Also included are descriptions of simulations from the software package PhET developed at the University of Colorado and many exercises using the software package MATLAB. Each of the chapters of the book has special features that cannot be found in any other book at this level. The Hartree-Fock applet described in Chapter 5 enables students to do Hartree-Fock calculations on any atom in the periodic table and discover for themselves the nature of the chemical elements. MATLAB programs described in Chapter 10 enable students to calculate transmission coefficients for barriers where the potential energy assumes a different value for a short interval and for more complex structures with two or three barriers. Chapter 12 has a careful treatment of the Dirac equation and a qualitative description of quantum field theory.