This course and other resources.

The books I have relied on most in preparing this course are:

Shankar, R. Principles of Quantum Mechanics 2nd ed. (Plenum 1994) [preview] [Errata to 13th printing, (2006)]
Gasiorowicz, S. Quantum Physics 3rd ed. (Wiley 2003) [Supplementary material] [errata]
Mandl, F. Quantum Mechanics (Wiley 1992)
Townsend, J.S. A Modern Approach to Quantum Mechanics (McGraw-Hill 1992) [preview]

Throughout these notes, I have provided section references, mostly to the ﬁrst three of these.

Note that Shankar and Townsend use Gaussian rather than SI units, as do older editions of Gasiorowicz. Notes on translation are given in section A.12.

I have found two sets of extensive on-line quantum mechanics notes that are at the right level for this course. One is by Prof Richard Fitzpatrick, of the University of Texas at Austin. His UG course notes are here and his PG notes here. The UG notes start at the level of our PHYS20101 course, but continue to the end of this course. The PG notes also start from the begining but more in the style of PHYS20602, and continue to the end of this course. They seem very much equivalent (though not quite idential) for the coverage of this course.

The other is by Prof Jim Branson of the University of California, San Diego, notes available here; these again start at the beginning, but go beyond this course and cover parts of PHYS30202 as well.

Both sets of notes should be useful for revision of background material and as an alternative resource for this course. Both have more details in the derivations than I have given here.

These notes have been prepared with TEX4ht, and use MathML to render the equations. If you are using Internet Explorer, you may need to download ”MathPlayer” from here. Once you have done so, the following should look more or less the same:

\frac{2 π}{ℏ} {|⟨ k_{f} | e ℰ ε \cdot r | k_{} ⟩|}^{2} δ (E_{i} - E_{f}) \int_{- \infty}^{\infty} x^{n} e^{- α x^{2}} d x = \sqrt{\frac{π}{α}}

The ﬁrst is MathML, the second is an image. Subtle things to look out for are bold-face for vectors $k$ etc; not so subtle is whether the square root in the second equation covers both numerator and denominator. If you are using Firefox, you may need to download STIX fonts; see here. Safari (even 5.1) is still a mess, unfortunately.

The advantage of MathML is accessibility (at least in theory), equations that can be magniﬁed if you change the magniﬁcation of the page (or that pop out with a click using “MathPlayer”), and much cleaner directories. The disadvantage is that I don’t think it looks as nice on average, and I don’t know in advance how much trouble might be caused by incompatable browsers. I may revert to using images for equations (as the web notes discussed above do) if there are widespread problems, so let me know.

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