Customer Reviews

Elements of Quantum Mechanics

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has an excellent treatment of quantum mechanics, especially density matrices. This book lacks both the confusion and perhaps depth of a bigger book. It is definately for chemists, and ideal for spectroscopists like Fayer. Physicists will definately find better books by physicists.

I don't know if it's worth 72 for the amount covered.

Fayer also made up his own notation for operators, which gets a little obnoxious.

This excellent graduate level textbook offers an overview of
the basic concepts of quantum mechanics with just the right amount of material and mix of fundamental theory and practical applications.It contains a more comprehensive introduction compared with other books that focus solely on the Schroedinger picture. Operator techniques and the Dirac notation are introduced in a clear way which should be widely accessible to Chemistry Graduate students.Its time dependent viewpoint is very intuitive. It covers material, such as an introduction to
density matrices, that is essential for reading the modern
literature.The book further includes topics such as excitons and
wavepackets which are not usually covered in graduate classes.
Instructors can get an entire power point set of lectures for the course from the author which makes it a pleasure to teach from this book.
I highly recommend this text.

I am a retired engineering manager who favors studying theoretical physics over golf. I recently completed a self-directed study of quantum mechanics using several books along with a variety of lectures and materials available on the web. I found when the going got rough with difficult material, I kept returning to Fayer's concise, accurate explanations, which cleared things up. Although this book is designed for a graduate course in chemistry or other fields, it excellent for self-study, particularly in conjunction with the lecture slides available on Fayer's web site. Highly recommended!

I took quantum chemistry from the author last fall and I found the book to be extremely helpful. Also it was short enough that I could actually do the readings in a reasonable amount of time. There is no history, no philosophizing, no fat. This is important, because a science book is no help if it is too long to read.

It is also quite lucid. I found I was able to do the problems in the back of the chapter without going to any of the lectures.

It goes through quantum using the Dirac notation almost exclusively, which makes many things simpler especially with oscillators and such. More importantly this book makes if easier to see the elegance in quantum systems and get a much better top down understanding of quantum.

So a good complement to this book would be McQuarrie's quantum chemistry to give Schroedinger's. This is filled with functions, equations operators and integrals or more generally details. From struggling McQuarrie one can get a detailed understanding of how to work with wavefunctions and their operators, but from Fayer one gets a broader sense of how these things come together without needing the math.

A serious student of quantum chemistry would need more than just this book and while most students would be tempted to start with a larger text using Schroedinger I strongly recommend this text as a superior starting place.