Customer Reviews

Applied Quantum Mechanics

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Harrison's book is a good compromise between learning the full, formal maths approach to quantum mechanics and a pragmatic desire by engineering students to know enough to do useful work. It deprecates such ideas as operators in Hilbert spaces in favour of describing such practical implementations as quantum dots, quantum wires, tunnelling and other inherently quantum phenomena.

The intent is to expose the reader to current active areas of solid state research and engineering, at the microscopic level when quantum effects must be taken into consideration. There is not enough here to do serious band structure calculations, for example. But you gain enough knowledge to understand and use band structure results that are presented to you.

This book is illuminating. It is the only book I have read that explicitly develops the whole quantum mechanics formalism from wave particle duality!

Starting from the premise that everything is both wave and particle, it derives the wavefunctions for electron, photon, phonon and develops the formalism of quantum mechanics. It then applied the formalism to classical systems (free electrons in 1D, 3D, quantum systems, atoms, molecules, and crystals etc). Connecting with other physics subjects (statistical physics, many-body, optics etc), it also shows how QM may be applied to describe many real world systems. Many examples are novel as they are rarely seen treated in other books.

The problem I have is that the book is not very easy to follow. To get a good grasp of it, one probably needs to have taken intermediate classes in classical mechanics, electricity and magnetism, and statistical physics. Several reasons make it hard. First the book mostly just only sketches the derivation. Filling the gap takes much efforts as I found and consulting relevant reference and/or text books is necessary. Second, it often merely states but does not explain physical arguments--many of them are not obvious. Besides, sentences are not clearly structured into points using transition words; often several points are simply pinned together into a very long sentence which goes through several logical twist an turns. So, this book definitely is not suitable to be used as the major textbook for a first time quantum mechanics course. It would however surve well complementing introductory QM texts like Griffiths, Zettili, and Messiah.