Quantum Mechanics

The goal of these lectures is to help you start to comprehend the quantum world and some of its strange behaviours. This is a bit of a step into the unknown, as should already be evident, and our classical intuition will not serve us well in the quantum world. Luckily for us, the language of mathematics describes the quantum world remarkably well for reasons that we still do not fully comprehend. Throughout these lectures, we will adopt an approach that embraces this mathematical description and uses it to develop a fresh sense of how the universe actually functions. 

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Contents:

  1. The Fundamental Ideas of Quantum Mechanics 

  2. A Quantum Particle in One Dimension 

  3. Postulates of Quantum Mechanics 

  4. The One-dimensional Harmonic Oscillator 

  5. Quantum Interpretations 

  6. Transformations and Symmetries 

  7. Rotation Invariance and Angular Momentum 

  8. Electron spin 

  9. Addition of Angular Momentum 

  10. Approximation Methods 

  11. Atoms 

  12. Atoms in Electromagnetic Fields 

  13.  Time-Dependent Perturbation Theory 

  14. Scattering Theory

These lecture notes are far from original. They borrow heavily from the following references:

1. Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, By David J. Griffiths.

2. Quantum Physics, By Stephen Gasiorowics.

3. Principles of Quantum Mechanics, By R. Shanker

4. Quantum Mechanics, By Claude Cohen-Tannoudji, Bernard Diu, Frank Laloe.

5. Concepts of Modern Physics, By Arthur Beiser.

6. David Tong: Lectures on Theoretical Physics.