Best AP Physics 2 Quizlet Decks by Unit

Unit 1: Fluids: Pressure and Forces (10-12%)

• Fluid systems – As with all physics topics, half the battle is defining your system appropriately. Make sure you get practice recognizing what things belong in your system, and what things belong outside.
• Density – All matter has a density, which can change under the influence of external effects. You’ll need to know how to calculate density and predict changes to density under different conditions, like an increase in temperature.
• Pressure and forces – Just like in Physics 1, you’ll be dealing with forces. The only difference is that now there are more sources of force. Also note that a force can be distributed over an area, which is what we call pressure. 
• Fluids and free body diagrams – Thought you were done with FBDs, did you? Learn how to apply FBDs to fluid situations.
• Buoyancy – or the force of a fluid keeping you afloat. Know how to calculate buoyancy and how to integrate it into your FBDs.
• Conservation of energy in fluid flow – Energy is conserved, just like in Physics 1. For fluids, we use Bernoulli’s equation and deal with energy densities instead of straight energy. 
• Conservation of mass flow rate in fluids – Mass is also a conserved quantity, which you can use to help solve for unknown variables involving fluid flow. 

Unit 2: Thermodynamics (12-18%)

• Thermodynamic systems – Strengthen those system defining muscles by applying them to thermo problems.
• Pressure, thermal equilibrium, and the ideal gas law –You’ll need to know how temperature relates to the kinetic energy of the molecules that make up the gas. Additionally, you can relate those things to pressure and volume using the ideal gas law. 
• Thermodynamics and forces – Learn how to apply your force toolbox to thermodynamic situations. 
• Heat and energy transfer – is essentially an extension of conservation of energy, only now we can actually explain how the heat dissipates via energy transfer, and predict the resulting temperature changes using Q=mCΔt.
• Thermodynamics and collisions – Remember those inelastic collisions where momentum was conserved but kinetic energy wasn’t? Well, now you explain why.
• Probability, thermal equilibrium, and entropy – AKA the molecular nitty-gritty of thermodynamics. You’ll need to be able to explain what entropy means, and how probability relates to thermodynamic quantities.

Unit 3: Electric Force, Field, and Potential (18-22%)

• Electric systems and charge – Again with the systems! The ever-pervasive essential knowledge point of “how to define a system” strikes again, but with electric charges. 
• Charge distribution: friction, conduction, and induction – i.e. know how to charge up various objects lying around your house, and how each type of charging mechanism works. 
• Electric permittivity – is a property of matter that describes how it interacts with electric fields. 
• Electric forces and free body diagrams – extend your FBD and force toolboxes to include electric forces.
• Gravitational and electromagnetic forces – You learned all about gravitation in Physics 1-- it has some fun parallels with Coulomb’s law.
• Electric charges and fields – You should be able to draw the electric field lines for any charge configuration and understand how field lines add or subtract.
• Conservation of electric energy – YAY a new conservation law, which we will use all the time in the next unit.

Unit 4: Electric Circuits (10-14%)

• Definition and conservation of electric charge – You touch on this briefly in unit 3, but it becomes super important in unit 4. 
• Resistivity and resistance – resistivity is a property of the material. Combined with the geometry of the material, you can create different resistances. 
• Resistance and capacitance – Resistance pulls energy out of the circuit, usually via heat dissipation. Capacitors are more or less rechargeable batteries, capable of storing charge and energy. 
• Kirchhoff’s loop rule – This rule helps you analyze circuits by exploiting conservation of energy. If you make a complete loop around the circuit, accounting for all voltage drops and gains, it should equal zero.
• Kirchhoff’s junction rule – This rule helps you analyze circuits by exploiting conservation of charge. Whatever current comes INTO a junction, must also LEAVE the junction.

Unit 5: Magnetism and Electromagnetic Induction (10-12%)

• Magnetic systems – Catching a trend, yet?
• Magnetic permeability and magnetic dipole moment – like electric permeability, matter also has a magnetic permeability. Matter also has a magnetic dipole moment, which is the fundamental source of it’s magnetic behavior.
• Vector and scalar fields – You’ve seen vector fields before, with electric and gravitational fields. These have a magnitude and a direction. Scalar fields are like electric and gravitational potential-- they don’t have a direction, just a value. 
• Monopole and dipole fields – You should know how to calculate a monopole field if you know how to calculate the electric field from a point charge. To make it a dipole, stick in the opposite charge and use vector addition. Magnetic monopoles don’t exist in nature.  
• Magnetic fields and forces – You should know how to calculate the magnetic field for various shapes, and how those fields affect different objects (like moving charges, current carrying wires, or other magnets).
• Magnetic flux – Flux can be thought of as “how much stuff is going through an area”. When the magnetic flux through a conducting loop changes, it pushes the charges around, inducing a current. Lenz’s law and Faraday’s law are how a LOT of modern electronics work. 

Unit 6: Geometric and Physical Optics (12-14%)

• Waves – A wave is a traveling disturbance that transfers energy and momentum. 
• Electromagnetic waves – in this unit we focus on the treatment of light as a wave, even though it can act like a particle (that’s in unit 7)
• Periodic waves – A periodic wave is one that repeats as a function of both time and position and can be described by its amplitude, frequency, wavelength, speed, and energy.
• Refraction, reflection, and absorption – when a wave encounters an object, it’s behavior can change. With refraction, it is bent off course according to Snell’s law. Reflection changes the direction of the wave, and absorption means the obstacle stole the energy. 
• Images from lenses and mirrors – You’ll need to know how to draw lens and mirror diagrams to determine where a real or virtual image will appear. The equations for calculating the actual heights and locations of images are included in the Quizlet deck.
• Interference and diffraction – Only waves exhibit interference and diffraction. Constructive interference occurs when the waves are in phase, adding their amplitudes. Destructive interference occurs when the waves are out of phase, a crest meets a trough, and they subtract. Diffraction is a special case of interference that makes sweet patterns (and is how we discovered that DNA was a double helix!)

Unit 7: Quantum, Atomic, and Nuclear Physics (10-12%)

• Systems and fundamental forces – Again. But this time, this also includes knowing the history of the atomic models, from Bohr to plum pudding, as well as the atomic structure and how to read the periodic table.
• Radioactive decay – charge, momentum, and nucleon number are conserved. You should be able to predict the outcome of various decays and calculate the energy transfer.
• Energy in modern physics – is quantized. Nuclei can only gain or lose energy at specific energy levels.
• Mass-energy equivalence – aka the famous E=mc2. Photons carry energy, even though they don’t have mass. Also, energy can be converted into mass and vice versa, like with pair production and electron-positron annihilation.
• Properties of waves and particles – Classical mechanics can’t explain all of the crazy stuff we observe in nature, like light behaving as a wave sometimes and a particle some other times. Turns out, matter can behave as both, too!
• Photoelectric effect – is more or less how we can trade light (photons) for electricity (electrons). When a photon transfers its energy to an electron, that electron can escape the atom it’s stuck to (it overcomes the work function or binding energy). We can then collect those free electrons and make electricity!
• Wave function and probability – At the quantum scale, matter is described by a wave function, which leads to a probabilistic description of the microscopic world.