The eleventh printing of this renowned book confirms its status as a classic. The book presents major advances in fundamentals of quantum physics from 1927 to the present. No familiarity with relativistic quantum mechanics or quantum field theory is presupposed; however, the reader is assumed to be familiar with non-relativistic quantum mechanics, classical electrodynamics, and classical mechanics. The author's clear presentation focuses on key concepts, particularly experimental work in the field.
 |
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||
Shop the Amazon.com Textbooks Store and save up to 70% on textbook rentals, 90% on used textbooks and 60% on eTextbooks. |
Book Description
Frequently Bought Together
Product Details
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images? |
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
20 of 23 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a very fine book on quantum electrodynamics and should not be confused with Modern Quantum Mechanics, which is a postumous text on quantum mechanics, too formal to my taste. Advanced Quantum Mechanics, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. The treatment of field quantization is very intuitive, based on Fermi's ideas, and Physics is always kept to the forefront. Calculations (there are plenty of them; this is not a couch book) are very detailed and, alas, must be redone with much attention, for typos are quite frequent. I believe this to be still the book to be recommended for a beginner. She should, after all, know the physics, and be able to do a back-of-envelope estimative of the size of Lamb shift, by Bethe's method. The book teaches you that.
10 of 10 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
Despite the title, the subject is Quantum Electrodynamics, meaning the physics of photons and electrons in interaction. So you'll find Dirac equation, Feynman diagrams, renormalization, Lamb shift, etc. There are hordes of books devoted to that. So what is the difference? The diference is Sakurai. He just couldn't write badly. And here he chose also a very good point of view: avoiding any excess of formalism. The book uses Dirac equations, basic principles of quantum mechanics and relativity, perturbation theory and common sense to derive approximate and accurate descriptions of all phenomena involving photons and electrons, including Lamb shift. You'll learn lots of physics and also Feynman's rules of calculation (the Feynman diagrams). And also a little renormalization. But only a little. Then you could go for the recent tomes of Steven Weinberg on Quantum Field Theory. Farewell!
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I would urge the reader not to dismiss this book too quickly on the basis of its age. This book fills a gap that isn't filled by any other text that I know of: it bridges an undergraduate/beginning grad course in quantum mechanics with a course in quantum field theory. My own experience, which I believe is somewhat typical, was to have a graduate course in quantum theory at the level of Cohen-Tannoudji, followed by a field theory course at the level of Peskin and Schroeder. It seems to me that these levels are separated by a virtual chasm.
I suppose it is natural that as theoretical physics grows, topics once considered crucial fall into the dustbin. Perhaps spending a few weeks studying the single-particle Dirac equation might simply be wasted time when one is eager to move as quickly as possible to the frontier of quantum field theory or string theory or whatnot. But to gain a satisfactory (by my own standards, of course) understanding of Peskin and Schroeder (P&S) level QFT, I needed to spend some time in the chasm. For example:
* Spending time really thinking about the Dirac equation was very helpful. Even though one can motivate quantum fields by resorting to special relativity and the axioms of quantum mechanics, it was very useful to understand in what ways the single-particle Dirac equation (over 60 pages in the book) is still useful, and in what ways it needs to be surplanted. This understanding has been very useful in studying, for example, bound-states and corrections to nuclear transition rates, where computations are nearly impossible using only field-theoretic techniques. It was also helpful in understanding the connection between fermionic field operators and single particle wave functions (which is barely a one-paragraph discussion in P&S).
* An elementary treatment of the quantum theory of radiation was very fun and helpful. I enjoyed working through Rayleigh scattering, spontaneous emission, etc. I feel like I can actually perform calculations along these lines, which I certainly didn't feel after P&S.
* In books like P&S or Ryder, the full machinery of Wick's theorem etc. tends to obscure what is actually happening when one calculates propagators and Feynman rules. Sakurai's treatment in Chapter 4 starts with the canonical formalism and derives cross-sections from scratch. While one loses some of the computational ease of simply starting with Feynman rules, one gains quite a lot. It becomes clear how exactly the propagator captures virtual pair-creation in a covariant manner. It becomes clear exactly why one needs to normal order operators in the Hamiltonian/Lagrangian. It becomes clear how time-ordering and normal-ordering work simultaneously when using Wick's theorem in the Dyson expansion, which is something that confused me in P&S. While path integrals offer the quickest route to calculating propagators and Feynman rules, the long route of deriving the photon propagator in the canonical formalism gave me a better understanding of how various pieces combined to yield a covariant result. And so on.
Like any book, there are some downsides:
* The organization is annoying. For example, Chapter 4, home of the discussion on quantum electrodynamics and field theory, is 120 pages long. It seems as if Sakurai thought for 5 minutes about organizing sections, decided it wasn't worth the effort, and just dumped everything into one chapter. I've been using the book for 2 years now, and I still get lost finding stuff in Chapter 4.
* The book uses a Euclidean metric tensor, so that covariant and contravariant indices are treated identically. Sakurai insists it's silly to not use such a metric, and perhaps one makes fewer computational errors, but virtually nobody uses such a metric any more, and converting back and forth is annoying.
* The book is cavalier about its description of both scattering and the quantum vacuum. I know it's subtle and difficult to discuss asymptotic states in scattering theory, or to discuss the vacuum in an interacting field theory, but you've gotta talk about it. Sorry. You can't just pretend everything is the same as in the free theory. You can't just stick the time-independent free-field creation and annihlation operators between the free-field vacuum and just start computing.
* Being written in 1967, the book doesn't at all serve as a complete text on quantum field theory: among other things, modern renormalization techniques, gauge theories and the standard model, and path integration are missing. But as I said, I think this book does a great job of filling the abovementioned gap, and shouldn't be taken as a stand-alone QFT book.
I think the negatives are more than made up for by one very great virtue of the book: Sakurai will always forego the slicker mathematics or the more general theorem if a gritty calculation makes the physical concepts more apparent. This book may seem old fashioned, but it is truly one of the most useful physics books I've ever studied.
I suppose it is natural that as theoretical physics grows, topics once considered crucial fall into the dustbin. Perhaps spending a few weeks studying the single-particle Dirac equation might simply be wasted time when one is eager to move as quickly as possible to the frontier of quantum field theory or string theory or whatnot. But to gain a satisfactory (by my own standards, of course) understanding of Peskin and Schroeder (P&S) level QFT, I needed to spend some time in the chasm. For example:
* Spending time really thinking about the Dirac equation was very helpful. Even though one can motivate quantum fields by resorting to special relativity and the axioms of quantum mechanics, it was very useful to understand in what ways the single-particle Dirac equation (over 60 pages in the book) is still useful, and in what ways it needs to be surplanted. This understanding has been very useful in studying, for example, bound-states and corrections to nuclear transition rates, where computations are nearly impossible using only field-theoretic techniques. It was also helpful in understanding the connection between fermionic field operators and single particle wave functions (which is barely a one-paragraph discussion in P&S).
* An elementary treatment of the quantum theory of radiation was very fun and helpful. I enjoyed working through Rayleigh scattering, spontaneous emission, etc. I feel like I can actually perform calculations along these lines, which I certainly didn't feel after P&S.
* In books like P&S or Ryder, the full machinery of Wick's theorem etc. tends to obscure what is actually happening when one calculates propagators and Feynman rules. Sakurai's treatment in Chapter 4 starts with the canonical formalism and derives cross-sections from scratch. While one loses some of the computational ease of simply starting with Feynman rules, one gains quite a lot. It becomes clear how exactly the propagator captures virtual pair-creation in a covariant manner. It becomes clear exactly why one needs to normal order operators in the Hamiltonian/Lagrangian. It becomes clear how time-ordering and normal-ordering work simultaneously when using Wick's theorem in the Dyson expansion, which is something that confused me in P&S. While path integrals offer the quickest route to calculating propagators and Feynman rules, the long route of deriving the photon propagator in the canonical formalism gave me a better understanding of how various pieces combined to yield a covariant result. And so on.
Like any book, there are some downsides:
* The organization is annoying. For example, Chapter 4, home of the discussion on quantum electrodynamics and field theory, is 120 pages long. It seems as if Sakurai thought for 5 minutes about organizing sections, decided it wasn't worth the effort, and just dumped everything into one chapter. I've been using the book for 2 years now, and I still get lost finding stuff in Chapter 4.
* The book uses a Euclidean metric tensor, so that covariant and contravariant indices are treated identically. Sakurai insists it's silly to not use such a metric, and perhaps one makes fewer computational errors, but virtually nobody uses such a metric any more, and converting back and forth is annoying.
* The book is cavalier about its description of both scattering and the quantum vacuum. I know it's subtle and difficult to discuss asymptotic states in scattering theory, or to discuss the vacuum in an interacting field theory, but you've gotta talk about it. Sorry. You can't just pretend everything is the same as in the free theory. You can't just stick the time-independent free-field creation and annihlation operators between the free-field vacuum and just start computing.
* Being written in 1967, the book doesn't at all serve as a complete text on quantum field theory: among other things, modern renormalization techniques, gauge theories and the standard model, and path integration are missing. But as I said, I think this book does a great job of filling the abovementioned gap, and shouldn't be taken as a stand-alone QFT book.
I think the negatives are more than made up for by one very great virtue of the book: Sakurai will always forego the slicker mathematics or the more general theorem if a gritty calculation makes the physical concepts more apparent. This book may seem old fashioned, but it is truly one of the most useful physics books I've ever studied.
Most Recent Customer Reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Besides Feynman's QED, this is a good intro
This is a great intro into QED, although I seriously recommend Feynman's little QED book. Renormalization is covered, as is most of Feynman's methods. Read more
Published 18 months ago by b1y
1.0 out of 5 stars
Excellent Text - Horrid Print Quality
The 1 star is only for the condition of the printed text itself, not for any content in the book.
Addison-Wesley has done a grave injustice to this classic with its... Read more
Addison-Wesley has done a grave injustice to this classic with its... Read more
Published on August 5, 2007 by J. Buncher
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good for you...
If you're reading reviews on advanced QM then I'm sure you'd like this book... as for me, I'm through with physics. Undergrad stuff is a breeze but it's not worth it anymore. Read more
Published on August 16, 2003
3.0 out of 5 stars
Out of date, but still could be useful
This book represents to a large degree an approach to quantum field theory that is now viewed as somewhat out of date. Read more
Published on October 7, 2002 by Dr. Lee D. Carlson
3.0 out of 5 stars
Horribly terse
This book is great - until you try to do the problems. I'm slightly peeved, having spent upwards of 30 hours (working with other grad students! Read more
Published on May 19, 2002 by "glueball"
3.0 out of 5 stars
Lacking Physical Insight
This textbook gives a rather formal treatment of quantum mechanics. That is not to say that it is in a theorem-proof format like Neumann, for example, but still I find it lacking... Read more
Published on July 5, 2000 by A. L.
4.0 out of 5 stars
Solid Book
This is an essential book for a student making the transition from nonrelativistic quantum mechanics to modern field theory. Read more
Published on April 19, 2000
3.0 out of 5 stars
J.j.sakhurai
i'm interesting cost is about 50-60 $ of the Advanced Quantum Mechanics by J. J. Sakurai.
Published on March 23, 2000 by Togtokh
4.0 out of 5 stars
Difficult book, for grad student but it rewards time spent.
This book certainly isn't for the casual reader, but it is a great book for those who want to learn Advanced quantum mechanics and quantum electrodynamics from a distinguished... Read more
Published on December 29, 1998
2.0 out of 5 stars
Not the best text
Most of the graduate students in physics and chemistry here at Cal agree that this book is incomplete and glosses over too much of the details. Read more
Published on October 24, 1998
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
Listmania!
|
|
