Customer Reviews

Lectures On Quantum Mechanics (Lecture Notes & Supplements in Physics Ser.))

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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".

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.

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.

This is the book that Sakurai's Modern Quantum is based on, but it contains material that I haven't seen anywhere else, such as a "derivation" of Schrodinger's equation from ideas about probability flow, etc. and a cool explanation of the whole quantum mechanics formalism based on photon polarization.

The later chapters contain lots of really useful insights - I especially liked the chapter on second quantization. Buy this book especially if you are looking for an alternative way to approach concepts in quantum mechanics. I highly recommend it as a supplement regardless of what stage you have reached in your education.

Besides having hard-to-read mathematical typeface, Baym is an unorganized set of lecture notes. One topic does not flow to the next like it does in Cohen-Tannoudji. My professor said Cohen-Tannoudji is contrived since he begins with "postulates of quantum" and works therefrom, making quantum seem like a deductive, axiomatic system. Although Baym may prove it is not through its haphazard presentation, Cohen-Tannoudji presents quantum in an orderly fashion suitable for learning.

There are many good books on quantum mechanics--the ones by J.J. Sakurai and Claude Cohen-Tannoudji et al. come to mind. Schwinger's lectures were off-scale superb, and the notes of his students were collected and published.

But this book _Lectures on Quantum Mechanics_ is simply charming. It may be the first graduate-level textbook on this subject that was written by a native speaker of English since Dirac's classic. In any case, it is another classic. It is very physical and very specific, which means it's easy to learn from.

We just started using this book for our Graduate Quantum Theory class. The whole book is just a muddled mess. Baym does not bother to define terms, and uses a rather odd mix of notation that is different from every other quantum book I own.

If you want a decent quantum book buy Libov

i bought it because my professor chose it as our textbook
it is a good book anyway

A completely useless waste of paper and money. $60 for what, if you please? Contains nothing you wouldn't find in other common texts, only there it is better explained. Fails miserably in problem-solving techniques. Very poorly structured. ZERO stars!!!