Welcome to the canvas information page for the courses

FYTK02/FYTM03/FYTM04

given by the Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Physics.

Covid-19 special

Note that presently, teaching should be conducted digitally. This includes supervision of master and bachelor students.

Contents

The following webpage contains generic information regarding the degree project courses FYTK02 and FYTM03-04 at the Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Physic. The course calendar and course stream on this page are not active.

General information

Semester and study period: Running every semester and study period
Level: bachelor for FYTK02 and master for FYTM03 and FYTM04
Language: English
Form of teaching: Individual supervision and a few mandatory course components (see below)
Assessment: Written report, work progress assessment, presentation
Grading scale: U/G/VG
Course plans:
FYTK02 (Swedish original), FYTK02 (English translation)
FYTM03 (Swedish original), FYTM03 (English translation)
FYTM04 (Swedish original), FYTM04 (English translation)
A list with (primarily) potential bachelor projects is available here. Master students may be inspired by this list, but are encouraged to talk to potential supervisors independently.
Complementary information (examples of previous thesis, etc) is found at the web page of the Department of Astronomy and Theoretical Physics: degree projects, bachelor project and masters project.

Teachers

Tobias Ambjörnsson, tobias.ambjornsson@thep.lu.se , phone 046-22 29 686
(Responsible for computational biology and biological physics projects)
Malin Sjödahl, malin.sjodahl@thep.lu.se, phone: 046-22 20 665
(Responsible for theoretical particle physics projects)

Schedule

There is a mandatory introduction meeting, and a few additional mandatory course components (see below), but mostly you and your supervisor decide when to meet.

Application

Through antagning.se

Project timeline

Below follows information, roughly ordered in time, about your thesis project.

At the start of the course

You must attend the compulsory introduction meeting, for projects starting during the spring 2021, Monday January 18th 2021 at 13.15, over Zoom. (Slides from the spring 2021 meeting are available here.) You must also attend the general physics introduction meeting. During these meetings, you will be informed about the compulsory modules

Academic Writing and Popular Science Writing
Library Resources

which, besides your thesis work, must be completed during the degree project, see further information here. (Master students who did their bachelor project in Lund after 2018 are not required to retake these modules.)

You must also sign a registration form with your supervisor (and reviewer) during the first week and provide a one-page project plan for your project. These are to be sent to the appropriate course responsible person (see above) at latest one week after the introductory meeting. Use the above registration form, not the Physics Department form.

Further information will be given during the introductory meeting.

Halfway through

We will have a midterm meeting (you, the course responsible and your supervisor) halfway through your thesis work to assess your progress. At this meeting we will discuss your progress and try to assess if you can complete the thesis on time. For master projects there will also be a compulsory half-time presentation in connection with the half-time meeting.

Thesis

The general guidelines for writing the thesis are:

The thesis should be written in the style of a scientific paper.
The target audience should be a peer student who has completed the Theoretical Particle Physics course (FYTN04) or the Theoretical Biophysics course (FYTN05). If your work is about general relativity, you may also assume that the reader has taken the General Relativity course (FYTN08), and for master theses you may assume Quantum Field Theory (FYTN10) if needed.
A well-written, concise thesis is valued higher than a lengthy, unpolished thesis.
Using the standard template, your thesis must not significantly exceed 25 pages (bachelor), 40 pages (30 hp master), 50 pages (60 hp master).

The thesis must be submitted before the deadline (approximately two weeks before the oral presentation) to the course responsible and the thesis reviewer. For projects ending during the fall semester 2020, the deadline is Jan 4th 2021 at 5 pm and for projects ending during the spring semester 2021 the deadline is May 20th, 5pm. The report should be sent electronically to the reviewer and course responsible. Before handing in the thesis, you must have iterated the text with your supervisor a few times. Your supervisor must approve of the thesis before sending it to the reviewer/course responsible. You get an LU-TP number (to be added to the front page of your thesis) by inserting your abstract into the binder "LU-TP 2020-" and then adding 1 to the previous LU-TP number. The binder is found in the bookshelf just outside the HUB lecture room. You may take the number yourself, ask your supervisor, delay getting one until after the presentation or (if this does not work out), ask the course responsible.

Oral Presentation

Oral presentations for projects ending during the fall semester are preliminarily scheduled for January 13th-15th 2021 and will take place over Zoom. For projects ending during the spring semester the preliminary presentation dates are May 31st-June 4th. You should have discussed and rehearsed your oral presentation with your supervisor in good time before the presentation. The length of the thesis presentation should be:

B.Sc.: 20 minutes presentation + 10 minutes questions
M.Sc., 30 hp (FYTM03): 30 minutes presentation + 15 minutes questions
M.Sc., 60 hp (FYTM04): 40 minutes presentation + 15 minutes questions
Master thesis half-time presentation: 20 minutes

For the oral presentation, we assess the time planning, presentation structure, communication skills and the ability to answer questions.

Some students have found this latex beamer template useful. (This link is here upon request from students. We have not tired the template ourselves, so please let us know of potential issues.)

What happens after the oral presentation

The reviewer, course responsible and the supervisor will meet (typically the same day as the presentation) and decide on a grade based on:

Work effort and time planning
Independence and commitment
Scientific work (quality, interpretation and assessment of results)
Written report (structure, clarity, language)
Oral presentation (time planning, structure, communication, ability to answer questions)

The grading guidelines distributed to the reviewers and examiners can be found here.

You will also get feedback on your report by the reviewer and the course responsible. Based on this feedback you will need to rewrite your thesis, which will then need to be approved by the reviewer. Once your thesis is approved, you should upload it to LUP (Lund University Publications Student Papers) along with your abstract and popular science description. Once the thesis is uploaded, the final approval is made by the course responsible, who at this stage also takes care that your grade is registered in LADOK and that your thesis is made public in LUP.