Physics 137A: Quantum Mechanics. The dreams that stuff are made of.
9:30am-11:00am | Tu/Th | 343 LeConte |
Course Outline: available as a PDF file.
Instructor: | Martin White, 561-C Campbell Hall |
GSI: | Peter Shepard, 281 LeConte |
Due Tue 11 Feb | Problem Set 1 | Solution Set 1 |
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.
Topic | Griffiths | Saxon | Merzbacher |
Formalism | 3 | IV | 4, 9, 10, 14 |
Bound states | 2 | VI | 6 |
Scattering | 2 | VI | 6 |
Wave packets | 2 | IV, V | 2, 13 |
Delta fn potl | 2 | VI | 6 |
Harmonic Osc | 2 | VI | 5, 13 |
WKB approx | 8 | -- | 7 |
Rayleigh-Ritz | 7 | -- | 8 |
N>1 particles | 5 | -- | 21,22 |
N>1 dimensions | 4 | -- | 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.
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: