This page contains the notes that I used to prepare for the prelim. If you'd rather have them in pdf form,
see here. I hope this is helpful; feel free to contact me with any comments or suggestions!
My Suggested Resources
As far as general physics knowledge goes, my list of textbooks is pretty standard:
Thornton and Marion and
Goldstein for Mechanics,
Griffiths and
Zangwill for E&M,
Townsend,
Griffiths, and
Shankar for Quantum, and
Tong's notes for Statmech.
One of the older students has also put together
Undergraduate Physics in a Hurry, a really well-typeset prep guide which is "one-third exposition, one-third worked prelim problems, and one-third bad jokes" – the worked examples here in particular are incredibly valuable.
You should also be aware of the
solutions dropbox contributed and maintained by some of the older grad students, as well as the
older solutions website and
a newer version of the site which allows community solutions that anyone can edit.
There are some other heirloom Princeton resources which should be emailed out to you at some point, but this is my attempt at centralizing some of them and making them easier to navigate.
January 2021
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Notes
Lagrangians, Hamiltonians, oscillations, central force motion, scattering theory, rigid body motion, and continuous media.
January 2021
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Notes
Maxwell's equations, potentials, energy and momentum in EM fields, multipoles, fields in matter, Laplace's equation, the method of images, capacitance and inductance, and radiation.
January 2021
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Notes
Quantum postulates and principles, pictures, the harmonic oscillator, angular momentum and spin, identical particles, 3D quantum mechanics, approximation methods, scattering, and quantum particles in EM fields.
January 2021
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Notes
Classical thermodynamics, the thermodynamic ensembles, quantum information, classical gases, quantum gases, the Debye model of solids, gases in EM fields, phase transitions, the Ising model, polymers, and Brownian motion.
January 2021
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Notes
Some mathematical facts that are good to know.