Overview
The third term of Ph125 will complete the topics in Shankar not covered in the first
two terms (except I will not be covering Chapter 20, Dirac Theory), and will
then discuss some applications. The applications will be motivated by the
modern experimental areas of high finesse electromagnetic cavities and trapped atoms,
including individual atoms interacting with photons and collective effects of
many ultracold trapped atoms such as Bose-Einstein condensation and
superfluidity. The many beautiful experiments in this area provide direct
illustrations and tests of the fundamental ideas of quantum mechanics you have
learned in the class.
This is the home page for Ph125c.
You can go to the
Ph125ab web site for the first two terms.
Quick Links
Announcements
- 5/8/08: Final arrangements - I plan to have the final ready by the morning of Wednesday, June 4. Seniors and grads must hand it in by Friday June 6, others by Friday June 13, although they may hand it earlier. The final will be the same for everyone. The last week of lectures (June 2-6) for juniors etc. will be reviews or special topics, depending on my thoughts and your requests. Any new topics in the last week will not, of course, be covered by the final.
- 5/8/08: Graded homeworks 3 and 4 are available for pick up in Sloan Annex. I've been looking over the paragraphs you wrote on a Berry's phase paper, and all that were handed in are fine. There was one, on Liouville's theorem for Bloch electrons, that did not have a name - let me know who you are! I would like to keep these for future reference, so unless I hear from you, I will not return them.
- The solutions to Homework 4 are now available.
- 4/29/08: The midterm is now available on the course syllabus page. Read these instructions first.
- 4/29/08: I had some mistakes in signs in the discussion of the displacement operator in lecture 13: please look at the revised version.
- 4/23/08 Graded Homework 2 is ready to be picked up in Sloan Annex.
- 4/22/08 Homework 4 is now available. In case the PMA web server goes down, as it did last weekend, I will also post the latest homework on my home page.
- Reminder: I try to make my lecture notes and/or slides available the evening before the lecture. You might like to print them out and bring them along to lectures so that you can add notes, or see what you don't have to copy down.
- 4/9/08: The solutions to homework 1 are now available.
- 4/7/08: In equation (19) of the notes for lecture 1 (used in Homework 1) a summation over n was missing. See revised notes for correct expression.
Vital Information
Location:
107 Downs
Time: MWF 10:00 am -
11:00 am
Instructor:
Prof. Michael Cross,
114A Sloan Annex, Mail Code 114-36, mcc at caltech.edu
Teaching Assistants:
Timothy Ryan Dulaney, dulaney at caltech.edu
Hsin-Hua Lai, hsinhua at caltech.edu
Chan Youn Park, splendid at caltech.edu
Jaewon Song, jaewon at caltech.edu
Please contact the TAs directly if you would like to make appointments
outside of normal office hours.
Michael Cross:
Monday 1-3pm; Additional
office hours by appointment or by popular demand. If
you need to contact me outside of office hours, please try email
first.
TAs
Th 6-8 pm 425 Downs/Lauritsen (theory interaction room).
Su 9-11 pm 425 Downs/Lauritsen (theory interaction room).
The TAs will rotate through these office hours.
Feedback:
I greatly appreciate student feedback, particularly during the course so that I can try to modify
the class to fit your needs. You can give feedback in person, by email, by campus mail, whatever you like.
Textbooks
- Required:
- Principles of Quantum Mechanics, Shankar, available at the bookstore. Since this is the main text you used for the first two terms, I will keep this as the standard reference for the remaining topics,
and will try to stick to its notation and conventions.
- Optional (on 3-hr reserve
at Fairchild Library):
Use these optional texts for alternate explanations or for
additional problems or examples.
- Standard Texts (from Ph125ab)
- Cohen-Tannjoudji et al., Quantum
Mechanics, covers some of the applications to atoms coupled to em waves well.
- Griffiths, Introduction to
Quantum Mechanics, not quite as advanced as this course.
- Gasioriowicz, Quantum
Physics, a good book, but a bit less rigorous than Shankar.
- Liboff, Introductory
Quantum Mechanics
- Merzbacher, Quantum
Mechanics
- Messiah, Quantum Mechanics
- Schiff, Quantum Mechanics,
- Landau and Lifshitz, Quantum Mechanics
- Sakurai, Modern Quantum Mechanics
- Sakurai, Advanced Quantum Mechanics
- Special topics
References will be given to original papers and review articles.
Lecture Notes
I will make my lecture notes available on the course
syllabus.
For basic topics covered well in Shankar the notes will just summarize the material. For topics
not covered in Shankar the notes will be more extensive. I will try to make the notes available
by the morning of the lectures, so that you can add to them as necessary during class.
Grading
The course grade will be one-third homework sets, one-third midterm, and one-third final.
Last updated 8 May, 2008
Ph125c: Quantum Mechanics