Teaching

Spring 2003

Physics 137A: Quantum Mechanics. The dreams that stuff are made of.

9:30am-11:00amTu/Th343 LeConte

Course Outline: available as a PDF file.


Review session: Sat 17th May, 4-6pm. 385 LeConte Hall.
Final exam: Tue 20th May, 8-11am.


Instructor: Martin White, 561-C Campbell Hall
GSI: Peter Shepard, 281 LeConte


Problem sets and solutions

Due Tue 11 Feb Problem Set 1 Solution Set 1


Handouts and related material

At some points during the course I will supplement the material in the text with handouts covering specific topics in more depth. These handouts can be downloaded below.

Dirac delta function fact sheet as Postscript or PDF.

You can find a nice discussion of the Fourier Transform in most elementary textbooks. For example these pages from Saxon's Elementary Quantum Mechanics.

The bra-ket notation is treated in Chapter 3 of Griffiths or Chapters 9 and 10 of Merzbacher (3rd edition).

Notes on the derivation of the phase shift for the 1D finite potential step as Postscript or PDF.

Hermite polynomial fact sheet as Postscript or PDF.


Reading in book

We won't be covering the topics in precisely the same order as they are covered in the text, so I have listed in the table below which chapters/ sections correspond to which topics.
TopicGriffithsSaxonMerzbacher
Formalism 3IV 4, 9, 10, 14
Bound states 2VI 6
Scattering 2VI 6
Wave packets 2IV, V2, 13
Delta fn potl2VI 6
Harmonic Osc 2VI 5, 13
WKB approx 8-- 7
Rayleigh-Ritz7-- 8
N>1 particles5-- 21,22
N>1 dimensions4-- 11,12
Hydrogen 4-- 12

Both Griffiths and Saxon treat the Harmonic Oscillator in terms of raising and lowering operators (as we do in class). Merzbacher does not.


Related Web Sites of Interest

Below are some links to "popular" articles on quantum mechanics related topics

Here are some web sites from other places who have course materials on the Web. I found the animations particularly useful for visualizing the time evolution of the wave packets.


Some animations of wavepacket evolution are here:

Spread of a free wavepacket:

Evolution of a harmonic oscillator:

Scattering:

Quantum bouncing ball:


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