Qual Update

No, I don't quite know how I did at this point, but suffice to say, the Fall 2005 Qualifying Exams are behind me.

Of the three written exams I took, I feel best about math, less good (but still OK) on modern physics, and it's questionable whether I passed classical physics. After working through one of those exams, you can almost hear your brain popping and sizzling!

For my oral examination, I was grilled on radiation interactions with matter; dependence of atomic number Z and number density on gamma-matter interaction cross-sections; central-field orbital potentials; quantum mechanical tunneling; wave scattering at potential barriers; resonance and absorptive effects; complex contour integration; solving ODE's via variation of parameters, Fourier analysis, and Laplace transformations; the theory of inverting Laplace transforms via use of the residue theorem; and driven harmonic oscillators.

The faculty panel sure kept me on my toes for the whole experience, and except for some glaring algebra mistakes, I thought I knew what I was doing. It was almost fun -- except for the long periods of silence from them when I was trying to find where I missed a minus sign! (And for those of us like myself who can't do messy algebra correctly on the first try on the fly, doing it in front of your adviser and a former math instructor can only be worse!) Hopefully the remaining two oral exams I'll take (for proposing and defending my thesis research) will go as well.

So, at this point I'm in the weird limbo between finishing the exam and waiting to hear how I did. Nominally I'll know on the 16^th. In the meantime, I'll get back to working on my research, which is much, much better than doing Qual problems!