Teaching

I have taught many courses in chemistry, physics, and mathematics to undergraduate students from chemistry (and related disciplines). For some of these courses I have made full lecture handouts/problem sets, whereas for others I just have PDFs explaining tricky concepts (or things that my students found challenging). I have also made some similar documents that are more aimed at graduate level, for new graduate students or final year undergraduates. The links below contain all of these that I've currently made - it will be added to periodically.

Some of them are older than others and probably could use a refresh. They are almost certainly not error-free - let me know of any you find.

Full Handouts/Courses

Spectroscopy (2023)

This lecture course was written as an introduction to the physical side of spectroscopy, for chemistry students. It does not go as deeply into mathematics as many courses do, but focusses more on intuitive understanding and learning how to think about the interaction of light with matter. An attempt was made to move slightly away from the "death by gas phase IR spectroscopy" that tends to be the bedrock of chemistry spectroscopy courses (although this wasn't totally possible due to factors beyond my control - stay tuned for an update in future).

Calculus for Chemists (2022)

A course on basic calculus designed for chemistry (or other natural science students). Assumes no familiarity with calculus (so no need for an A level maths prerequisite). Turns out GeoGebra is quite a nice tool (even if getting to output useful tikz files is a complete pain).

Ultrafast Optics: For Chemists (2021)

This handout grew whilst I was preparing to give a short talk to my research group about ultrafast optics and lasers. Many people enter ultrafast or nonlinear spectroscopy from a variety of backgrounds, especially from the life sciences. Most books on this topic are undoubtedly rigorous and thorough, but also entirely inaccessible for somebody without a physics degree. This handout aims to bridge that gap, and is now published as a book through IOPebooks .

QM of Molecular Structure and Bonding (2024)

These notes form a short course on the quantum mechanics behind molecular structure and chemical bonding. I've tried to get away from too much abstract QM, because chemistry students who are already sceptical about learning stuff that looks like physics really don't really see the point of it. Hence there is more of a focus on how it applies to chemistry and chemical bonding.

Introductory Quantum Mechanics (2019)

This is the handout for a six lecture course designed for chemistry undergraduates meeting quantum mechanics for the first time. There is minimal assumed knowledge and it ends up providing a basic understanding of rotational and vibrational quantisation of simple molecules. It is kept quite qualitative, so there is minimal maths. There is also an associated problem set with solutions. I wrote this many years ago now, I would do it very differently now.

Data Analysis using Python (2019)

This is the handout for a short course aimed to help undergraduate chemistry students with no knowledge of programming to be able make simple plots and figures using Python and Matplotlib (it's probably badly named as it doesn't really help you do any actual analysis in retrospect..). It will maybe be useful for anyone who wants to start using Python to generate figures (as everyone should). I made this a long time ago - arguably before I was any good at Python.

Simulating a Velocity-Map Imaging Spectrometer (2020)

This rather rambling and questionably complete document was the culmination of one of the worst¹ things I've ever been asked to do in my life. I was mostly trying to find a good geometry for a velocity-map imaging spectrometer, but then ended up in a SIMION rabbit hole and it was all a fairly dark and depressing experience. Hopefully this document a) explains a bit about how VMI works; b) demonstrates that the geometry that Eppink and Parker made in the 80s is still basically fine for 99% of users; and c) helps people use SIMION (which is excellent software, looking back) and Lua without wanting to rend down their computer in a vat of acid after every work day. It's really aimed at new graduate students.

¹ At the time it was horrendous, but now I kind of miss electrostatic optics. The scientific equivalent of ultra-endurance cycling - awful at the time, but retrospectively fun.

Short Explanatory Notes

Electromagnetic Waves

This note explains some concepts related to electromagnetic waves (namely, what a wavevector is, and what 'phase' means), and gives a general introduction to the physics. Students who aren't from a physics background find this challenging in my experience (I definitely did). It formed part of the appendix to my book too.

Statistical Mechanics: The Background

This note walks through the background of statistical mechanics and tackles a simple problem of calculating the internal energy of a box of atoms starting just from quantum mechanical expressions for energy levels. Most confusion around statstical mechanics seems to arise from people not understanding the point of it, or understanding why we care about partition functions so much. Hopefully this goes some way to remedying the situation, and can convince you that it's really astoundingly beautiful.

Nuclear Spin Statistics

The influence of nuclear spin statistics on rotational spectra often seems confusing, and it can seem that there are a lot of formulae pulled out of nowhere to help explain what we see. This short note aims to explain the influence of nuclear spin statistics by considering the effect of a rotation on the total wavefunction of a diatomic molecule. It assumes you're reasonably adept with typical undergraduate chemist level quantum mechanics.

Combination Differences

This note walks through the process of taking combination differences of lines in a rovibrational spectrum (a high resolution IR spectrum so that rotational lines are resolved as well as vibrational lines). By doing this you can find rotational constants for the different vibrational levels, and extrapolate back to an "equilibrium" rotational constant (if such a thing is meaningful - I didn't set the exam question).

Matrix Multiplication

In my experience people tend to be fine with matrix multiplication when it's done on a matrix drawn out in full (so you can just go column by row etc..), but then fall apart when you write the matrix multiplication using summation notation (which is obviously a lot more powerful if you want to multiply a big matrix). This note explains how you do this, and what steps are legal/illegal when using the sum notation.

Ultrafast Photochemistry

I made this beautifully handwritten document as a supplement to the slides of an photochemistry course I was teaching. I felt like some of the detail about ultrafast photochemistry was a bit missing, so made this as a supplement.

Degeneracy in Molecular Term Symbols

This whiteboard was made after a lockdown online tutorial in which one of my excellent students at Merton college pointed out that I'd been teaching this incorrectly for a whole year. It aims to explain why the degeneracy of a molecular term is not the standard 2J+1 (as in atoms), but is actually 2S+1. It boils down to how the angular momentum vectors are projected, and in molecules you project to the molecule-fixed axis not the space-fixed axis.

Chemical Kinetics Revision Sheets

I made a selection of these handwritten (and questionably legible) revision sheets covering basic topics in undergraduate chemical kinetics: approximations in kinetics (steady-state approximation and pre-equilibria); basic rates and stoichiometry ; simple collision theory ; Lindemann theory (and a sequel ); some details on the maths behind transition state theory (and a sequel).

Slater Determinants

A couple of students once came to me in a last minute exam panic about not understanding the point of a Slater determinant . I made this in a rush so it doesn't really explain why Slater determinants work, but does show that they do work for a simple system. Maybe useful if you are very new to the idea.

Population vs Sample Statistics

Often it isn't clear to students why we have two formulae for standard deviation - the population and sample versions. This note explains it a bit further, using an example stolen from Michael Burt. The data that was used in the example is here (.txt file) if you want to check my arithmetic.