B.Sc. students

Reading

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

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

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 info.  You should:
   
   1. make high-quality figures/tables for your results. Each figure should have a long caption summarizing again which quantities have been plotted for which setup and obtained with which method.
   2. describe what you are seeing in each figure in the text
   3. discuss what these results mean in the text.
4. Conclusions and Outlook:  where you summarize what is now known a posteriori, i.e., where things stand 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

Your work should present the shortest, clearest, least cluttered path from your problem (introduction) to your conclusions. Detours, e.g., technical discussions, codes, parameter dumps, tangential observations, etc., go into appendices.

Do not start from the introduction, start writing the results section first. Start with your figures, polishing them, add captions.

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".

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