Radiation Processes in Astrophysics

Here I share the resources from Radiation Processes in Astrophysics (ASTR 254) taught by Professor Fausto Cattaneo. This was the first quarter where classes were getting back to in-person after COVID-19 restrictions. I had to take an in-person midterm and final, which ended up being pretty hard after a year and a half of not testing in person.

This class was lectured like a regular class, on a blackboard with chalk with the professor looking at his notes every now and then. Honestly didn’t understand too much throughout the class just because there was a certain expectation of E&M knowledge that I straight up did not know. Luckily, he spared us the quantum mechanics related to radiation processes. Also luckily, I would take E&M later in the school year, which cleared up lots of misconceptions I had. Either way, the class covered how we physically receive the EM radiation from astrophysical sources.

We used two textbooks for this class: Radiative Processes in Astrophysics by Rybicki and Lightman and Radiative Processes in High Energy Astrophysics by Ghisellini.

The class covered the following topics:

1. Description of the Radiation Field
2. Specific Intensity
3. Radiative Transfer Equation
4. Thermal Radiation vs Black Body Radiation
5. Einstein Coefficients
6. Scattering: Random Walks
7. Maxwell’s Equations
8. Electromagnetic Wave Plane Wave Equations
9. Poynting Vector
10. Green’s Function
11. Electromagnetic Potentials
12. Retarded Potentials of Moving Charge
13. Larmor’s Formula
14. Thomson Scattering
15. Lorentz Transformations & Four-Vectors & Minkowski Metric
16. Brehmstahlung: Emission and Absorption

Here I share my lecture notes:

Lecture 1

Lecture 2

Lecture 3

Lecture 4

Lecture 5

Lecture 6

Lecture 7

Lecture 8

Lecture 9

Lecture 10

Lecture 11

Lecture 12

Lecture 13

Lecture 14

Lecture 15

Lecture 16

Lecture 17