<p>At least at my school, it is not required. I'm just wondering, why?</p>
<p>Physical chemistry is the theoretical framework of all of materials science. Thermodynamics is obvious. Phase transformations and condensed phases are described by statistical mechanics. Electronic and optical properties are described with quantum mechanics. Chemical Engineering students have to take it, and Chemical Engineering has less to do with physical chemistry than MSE does; for one, stat/quant mech are useless to them.</p>
<p>Most physical chemistry is separated into two courses: Quantum and Thermo.</p>
<p>Thermo: I promise you, any engineer worth their salt, they take thermo. They probably take it in the mechanical engineering department, as materials is traditionally an offshoot of mechanical engineering. And mech engineers do A LOT of thermo.</p>
<p>Quantum: There are two answers:
Most engineers go into industry and don’t need the theoretical underpinnings to do work. All of semiconductor physics is heavy duty solid-state physics (which relies on QM), but EE majors don’t take the full gantlet of QM classes. While insightful, the theoretical underpinnings aren’t needed to do work.
Rather than take a class on quantum mechanics and build from there (into optical/electrical properties or crystal structures), they just take the classes on optical/electrical properties and crystal structures. The QM is abstracted in these topics. If you go into graduate school in this field, you’ll probably have to take more classes on crystal structure and so forth, which probably has QM built in (the same way physics classes have math built in. I can’t prove the eigenvalue problem has such and such answer, but I take it on face value and do work)</p>
<p>SIDENOTE: We’ve all seen “Purity” by xkcd*. You can’t just move up the food chain and expect to understand everything below. A biochemist might be able to explain why I feel depression (psychology), but physicist would have trouble using QM to explain why I depression. </p>
<p>Most MSE people take MSE thermo, which is pretty different than what a MechE will take. Yeah, we’ll do some stuff with engine cycles and whatnot (Carnot is pretty important to everyone), but the goal of a MSE thermo class is more similar to ChemE since we aim more towards activity of mixtures. In my experience, the end goal of thermo for most materials people is being able to fundamentally understand phase diagrams and why materials behave the way they do when you mix them. A very different focus than what you’ll get in MechE.</p>
<p>Also, looking at PChem from the MIT open courseware, most of that stuff is a bit more fundamental than what you’ll be seeing in most materials programs. If you’re really interested in quantum stuff, you’ll take it on your own either through the chem or physics departments. In my experience, a “quantum for engineers” class is common, where you do a little bit of quantum and see most of the results without having to solve the Schrodinger Equation a billion times. Really, solid state physics is more important to most materials people, and, as such, the helium atom, rigid rotors, MO theory, etc aren’t that interesting. I think it’s mostly because MSE people deal more with condensed matter while Chem and ChemE deal with molecular systems more often.</p>