These lecture notes comprise a three-semester graduate course in quantum mechanics at the University of Illinois. There are a number of texts which present the basic topics very well; but since a fair quantity of the material discussed in my course was not available to the students in elementary quantum mechanics books, I was asked to prepare written notes. In retrospect these lecture notes seemed sufficiently interesting to warrant their publication in this format. The notes, presented here in slightly revised form, consitutute a self-contained course in quantum mechanics from first principles to elementary and relativistic one-particle mechanics. Prerequisite to reading these notes is some familiarity with elementary quantum mechanics, at least at the undergraduate level. Preferably the reader should already have met the uncertainty principle and the concept of a wave function. Prerequisites also include sufficient acquaintance with complex cariables to be able to do simple contour integrals and to understand words such as "poles" and "branch cuts." An elementary knowledge of Fourier transforms and series is necessary. I also assume an awareness of classical electrodynamics.
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About the Author
Gordon Baym has remained at Illinois since his arrival; a frequent visitor to Nordita and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, he has also been a visiting professor at the Universities in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagorya. His principal research interests have been in the physics of condensed matter in systems ranging from liquid helium to neutron stars and high energy nuclear collisions. He is also the author of Lectures in Quantum Mechanics. Leo P. Kadanoff left Urbana for Brown University in 1969 and thereafter joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1978, where he is presently the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor of Physics. After his early research in Green’s functions, he returned to study of critical phenomena near phase transitions, and then toward models of urban growth; his research is now aimed at turbulence and chaos in many-particle systems. For his work is critical phenomena, he received the Buckley prize of the American Physical Society, the Wolf Foundation award, and the Elliot Cresson medal of the Franklin Institute.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Good companion text with many useful insights--especially for those going onto study quantum field theory,
By Ulfilas (Washington, DC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lectures On Quantum Mechanics (Lecture Notes & Supplements in Physics Ser.)) (Paperback)
This book grew out of Gordon Baym's Quantum Mechanics lectures at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in the late 1960's. As such, it is really more suitable as a companion text rather than as a primary text. That said, I found that Baym provides a degree of physical intuition that is not found in the standard texts. I especially like Baym's discussion of creation and annihilation operators as well as Fermi's Golden Rule. Baym also provides a good treatment of the Klein Gordon and Dirac equations, the relativistic analogues of the Schrodinger equation for Bosons and Fermions. In general, Baym seems to have the intention of supplying the reader with the necessary preparation for the study of quantum field theory--an approach understandable in light of the fact that Julian Schwinger (one of the pioneers of quantum field theory and co-winner of the 1965 Noble Prize and physics for quantum electrodynamics along with Feynman and Tomonaga) was Baym's Ph.D. adviser.
Emblematic of this book is its discussion of the topic "Angular Momentum and The Harmonic Oscillator" (pp.380-386) within Chapter 17 which covers "Rotations and Tensor Operators." Based on a 1952 Atomic Energy Commission (What the Department of Energy used to be called) report by Julian Schwinger, angular momentum is modeled as two harmonic oscillators, each corresponding to its own creation and annihilation operator which moves the value of each oscillator up or down by a spin 1/2 "quantum". The total number of spin quanta shared by the two oscillators is seen to correspond to the angular momentum quantum number j. The difference between the number of spin quanta in each oscillator then corresponds to the quantum number m. Of course there are various commutation relations between the operators and before you know it, you have a clever way of calculating rotation matrix elements. There is even an amusing post-script that a scheme involving three harmonic oscillators corresponding to "quarks" can be used to generate the SU(3) symmetries of strongly interacting particles. Back when Baym first penned this textbook he observed that "It is an open question whether the quarks are real particle or not".
4 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A simple reference for a complex subject,
By A Customer
This review is from: Lectures On Quantum Mechanics (Lecture Notes & Supplements in Physics Ser.)) (Paperback)
This book exposes the essential Quantum Mechanical topics in a non-traditional order, and explores more advaced subjects as well, without losing clarity. The notation is easier to follow than most graduate level text books. Particularly good chapters are those concerning to Quantization of Radiation and Second Quantization.
3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
original and complete,
By chicken head cut off "mcscientist" (Gainesville/Orsay France) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Lectures On Quantum Mechanics (Lecture Notes & Supplements in Physics Ser.)) (Paperback)
I had baym when i was an undergrad ambitiously taking a grad class, so I can understand how to the novice this book can be intimidating: it is on the level of sakurai.
That being said, it is uncommonly complete and it has original presentations of material which is otherwise identical from text to text. For example the schrodinger equation in one place is derived as a hopping-problem in the continuum limit and he has a chapter on cooper-pairs which to my knowledge appears in no other intro QM book. QM should probably be learned from a variety of sources because, just as there is wave mechanics and lots of special functions there is also powerful symmetry methods and algebraic techniques. were I to recommend a set to study from I'd probably pick baym, shankar or sakurai, and landau.
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