Electron Interference by the Italian National Research Council (1976)
Source. Institutional video about the 1974 single electron experiment by Merli, Missiroli, Pozzi from the University of Bologna.
Then actually show the result live on a television screen, where you see the interference patterns only at higher electron currents, and then on photographic film.
This was elected "the most beautiful experiment" by readers of Physics World in 2002.
Are particles bounced by the first wall in the double slit experiment? by 
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16It would be amazing to answer this with single particle double slit experiment measurements!
Quantum version of the Hall effect.
As you increase the magnetic field, you can see the Hall resistance increase, but it does so in discrete steps.
Gotta understand this because the name sounds cool. Maybe also because it is used to define the fucking ampere in the 2019 redefinition of the SI base units.
At least the experiment description itself is easy to understand. The hard part is the physical theory behind.
The effect can be separated into two modes:
- Integer quantum Hall effect: easier to explain from first principles
- Fractional quantum Hall effect: harder to explain from first principles
- Fractional quantum Hall effect for : 1998 Nobel Prize in Physics
- Fractional quantum Hall effect for : one of the most important unsolved physics problems as of 2023
TODO original experiment?
Laughlin paper: 1981 Quantized Hall conductivity in two dimensions.
- 1859-1900: see Section "Black-body radiation experiment". Continuously improving culminating in Planck's law black-body radiation and Planck's law
- 1905 photoelectric effect and the photon
- TODO experiments
- 1905 Einstein's photoelectric effect paper. Planck was intially thinking that light was continuous, but the atoms vibrated in a discrete way. Einstein's explanation of the photoelectric effect throws that out of the window, and considers the photon discrete.
- 1913 atomic spectra and the Bohr model
- 1885 Balmer series, an empirical formula describes some of the lines of the hydrogen emission spectrum
- 1888 Rydberg formula generalizes the Balmer series
- 1896 Pickering series makes it look like a star has some new kind of hydrogen that produces half-integer entries in the Pickering series
- 1911 Bohr visits J. J. Thomson in the University of Cambridge for his postdoc, but they don't get along well
- Bohr visits Rutherford at the University of Manchester and decides to transfer there. During this stay he becomes interested in problems of the electronic structure of the atom.
- 1913 february: young physics professor Hans Hansen tells Bohr about the Balmer series. This is one of the final elements Bohr needed.
- 1913 Bohr model published predicts atomic spectral lines in terms of the Planck constant and other physical constant.
- explains the Pickering series as belonging to inoized helium that has a single electron. The half term in the spectral lines of this species come from the nucleus having twice the charge of hydrogen.
- 1913 March: during review before publication, Rutherford points out that instantaneous quantum jumps don't seem to play well with causality.
- 1916 Bohr-Sommerfeld model introduces angular momentum to explain why some lines are not observed, as they would violate the conservation of angular momentum.
Introductory Quantum Mechanics by Richard Fitzpatrick (2020) by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16This LibreTexts book does have some interest!
MIT 8.06 Quantum Physics III, Spring 2018 by Barton Zwiebach by Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16
Ciro Santilli 37 Updated 2025-07-16Instructor: Barton Zwiebach.
Free material from university courses:
- physics.weber.edu/schroeder/quantum/QuantumBook.pdf (archive) "Notes on Quantum Mechanics" pusbliehd by Daniel V. Schroeder (2019) The author is from from Weber State University.
Summary:
- Chapter 2 "Band Structure" covers electronic band theory
Looks very impressive! Last update marked 2011 as of 2020.
Goes up to "A.15 quantum field theory in a Nanoshell", Ciro have to review it to see if there's anything worthwhile in that section.
Personal page says he retired as of 2020: www.eng.fsu.edu/~dommelen/ But hopefully he has more time for these notes!
And he appears to have his own lightweight markup language that transpiles to LaTeX called l2h: www.eng.fsu.edu/~dommelen/l2h/
Last updated: 2013.
There were apparently some lecture videos at: web.archive.org/web/20030604194654/http://physicsstream.ucsd.edu/courses/spring2003/physics130a/ as pointed out by Matthew Heaney[ref], .mov files can be found at: web.archive.org/web/*/http://physicsstream.ucsd.edu/courses/spring2003/physics130a/*, but we were yet unable to open them, related:
Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project
Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
Intro to OurBigBook
. Source. We have two killer features:
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- a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
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This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
Figure 1. Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page. View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivativeVideo 2. OurBigBook Web topics demo. Source. - local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
- to OurBigBook.com to get awesome multi-user features like topics and likes
- as HTML files to a static website, which you can host yourself for free on many external providers like GitHub Pages, and remain in full control
Figure 3. Visual Studio Code extension installation.
Figure 4. Visual Studio Code extension tree navigation.
Figure 5. Web editor. You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.Video 3. Edit locally and publish demo. Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.Video 4. OurBigBook Visual Studio Code extension editing and navigation demo. Source. 
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