B.Sc. students

Reading

To be a good writer, you have to read a lot and you have to write a lot.

General

• A. Zagoskin: Quantum Theory of Many-Body Systems, Springer 1998.
  Nice introduction. Chapters 1 and 3.1 are mandatory reading for most of what we do.
• J. W. Negele and H. Orland: Quantum Many-particle Systems, CRC Press 1998.
  More in-depth and formal discussion of quantum many-body systems.

Writing

A B.Sc. thesis should not be too long. Aim for 12 – 20 pages.

The intended audience is past you, before you started the work (i.e., you should document what you have learned).

A good structure for a thesis (or paper) is:

1. Introduction: where you summarize what was known a priori, i.e., where things stood before your work.  You should:
   1. embed your topic in a wider scientific concept ("zoom in" to your problem)
   2. describe the problem and why it is interesting
   3. what attempts have been made before
2. System and Method: document the system and which methods and techniques you have used in tackling the problem.  Resist any temptation to write a textbook, instead heavily cite appropriate sources! You should give the minimum information needed to understand the results, no more, but also no less.  You should:
   1. describe the system under study, and the relevant properties needed;
   2. give definitions of all the quantities that are measured/computed;
   3. expose the method used to measure/compute these quantites.
3. Results and Discussion: the main part of your work. Give enough evidence for supporting your conclusions, but do not include irrelevant figures.
4. Conclusions and Outlook:  where you summarize what is now known a posteriori, i.e., where things after your work.  Describe:
   1. What new things have you learned from your work,
   2. How these conclusions agree or disagree with previous or related work,
   3. which new questions arise from your work and are interesting topics for follow-up studies

Technical discussions, codes, parameter dumps, tangential observations go into appendices.

The abstract is a short version of each of these parts. Life hack: abstract = all of the parts above, each one condensed into 1-2 sentences.  An abstract must  be specific: e.g., "we observe a X% increase in quantity Y for system Z", not "we observe a significant increase in relevant quantities".

Do not start from the introduction, start writing the results section first.

Table of contents