PHYS 5720

Prof. Zheng is most probably the most organized professor I had so far. She gives out scanned copies of her full lecture notes at the beginning of the class, and going through it is her lecture. She is really nice and does a lot of preparation for every lecture. Say, she actually does her assigned HWs before her assigns it, and will give out hints so that problems are at a reasonable difficulty. She incorporates information from multiple textbooks, which otherwise would be very difficult and tedious to look up on your own. Her lectures and HW are complete and very well self-contained, so you don't have to worry about probelms on mid-terms and finals being completely new. Technically I think one can survive this class with only special relativity and QM I, but you will have a pretty tough time. She introduces and tries to explain the state-of-the-art physics research being done, which sometimes confuses herself too. Overall, this is a very solid class in particle and nuclear physics for an undergraduate/graduate elective with a good mix in established theories and current unsolved questions.