Books on Quantum Mechanics?

manjunaths asks: "I would like to ask the physicists here to recommend some books on Quantum Mechanics. For those of us who have a decent background in calculus and have done some advanced physics (field theory, network theory etc.,). The books must have math as well as theoretical explanation. If it has examples which explain/relate to real world physics that would be really nice."

Comments

Sounds like Feynman's texbooks

[Muhammar]

Try Feynman Lectures, Feynman "Six Easy Pieces" and "Six Not-So-Easy Pieces". Most of the physics has not aged from the time the books was written, - QED, relativistic gravitation and the Standard model were almost complete by then. And he had unusual gift for readability and ingenuous practical examples. [I think he won some teaching awards for his books, also.]

That is what I heard - but try to ask some physicist next time :)

Here is a nifty interview with Feynman (1979):
http://www.omnimag.com/archives/interview s/feynman .html

Re:Sounds like Feynman's texbooks

[epsilon720]

Six Easy/Not-So-Easy Pieces actually have very little quantum physics in them, but they do have a good deal on simple and relativistic mechanics, as well as symmetry and space-time. They are definitely both good reads, but probably not what you're looking for.

Griffiths

[poincaraux]

There is absolutely no question. David Griffith's Introduction to Quantum Mechanics is by far the best intro book out there. His prose is amazing, his explainations are always interesting and illuminating, and (pehaps best of all), he always gets the math right.

If you haven't poked around in a lot of intro (or "advanced"!) quantum books, you may not realize how important those things (especially the math bit) are. But it wouldn't matter if hadn't read any other books. If you gave them all a fair shot, you'd choose Griffiths because his explanations are just so much better than everyone else's.

Trust me. Griffiths.

Once you've read it, you may be ready for something more advanced (maybe Sakurai, or even the poorly written but still amazingly complete Cohen and Tannoudji, or even Feynman's QED), but nothing compares to Griffiths for a good introduction to Quantum.

Re:Griffiths

[jgardn]

I second that. The book is very well written -- I would argue that it is probably the best written book I had during the entire four years I was there.

However, before you dive into Griffith's, you'll really have to brush up on Calculus and Differential Equations, as well as a variety of mathematics that you probably won't see unless you are going to grad school in math. The best book for this is "Mathematical Methods in the Physical Sciences" by Mary Boas.

This book was used for the "weed-out" class in the sophomore year at the University of Washington Physics department. The reason was that if you couldn't keep up with the math, and if you couldn't make sense of it all, than you really couldn't cut it as a physicist. It was the class where 100 people show up the first quarter, and 15 show up the next (because the other 85 lost interest or failed). Those 15 graduated with reasonably good grades.

If you complete Boas's book, and you can understand the math behind Griffith's book, then you are well on to your way to grad school in physics, if you desire it. Just brush up in a few other areas (EM, thermo, GR, etc...), and you might be ready for the GRE.

Anyway, it'll be interesting having another "real" physicist around here who actually understands what the Uncertainty Principle really means and where it comes from and its effect on the universe, rather than these posers who have no idea that a fourier transform applies to QM at all.

Re:Griffiths

[mph]

From my personal fortunes file:

Gauss's law is always true, but it is not always useful.

-- David J. Griffiths, "Introduction to Electrodynamics"
%
[A] potato would explode violently if the cancellation [of electrical
charge] were imperfect by as little as one part in 10^10.

-- David J. Griffiths, "Introduction to Electrodynamics"
%
Under the integral sign, then, you can peel a derivative off one
factor in a product and slap it onto the other one--it'll cost you a
minus sign, and you'll pick up a boundary term.

-- David J. Griffiths, "Introduction to Quantum
Mechanics"
%
[C]anning jars evidently do not obey Laplace's equation.

-- David J. Griffiths, "Introduction to Electrodynamics"
%
I would be delinquent if I failed to mention the archaic nomenclature
for atomic states, because all chemists and most physicists use it
(and the people who make up the Graduate Record Exam *love* this kind
of thing). For reasons known best to nineteenth-century
spectroscopists, l=0 is called "s" (for "sharp"), l=1 is "p"
("principal"), l=2 is "d" (for "diffuse"), and l=3 is "f"
("fundamental"); after that I guess they ran out of imagination,
because the list just continues alphabetically.

-- David J. Griffiths, "Introduction to Quantum Mechanics"
%
Robert Hooke (1635-1703). The equivalent of this force law was
originally announced by Hooke in 1676 in the form of a Latin
cryptogram: CEIIINOSSSTTUV. Hooke later provided a translation: ut
tensio sic vis [the stretch is proportional to the force].

-- Marion & Thornton, "Classical Dynamics of
Particles and Systems"
%

(That last one is a slightly off-topic bonus fortune, demonstrating how the nature of scientific publication has changed over the past few centuries.)

QM, sort of?

[ThorGod]

Check out here. That's a GPL'ed book a professor at my school (go NM Tech!) has written as an interesting freshman year physics book. It covers some basic QM, amonsgt the other things you usually get freshman year in physics.

In earnest, that book is a work in progress and it's really important to do the problems to get the full meaning from the text.

Hope that helps :)

A couple of classics

[balamw]

I'm a Physics Ph.D. and I found the following most useful in grad school while studying for the quals.

• Cohen-Tannoudji: very comprehensive, but perhaps overwhelming due to its heft/cost. Heavy into Dirac (bra-ket) notation.
• Landau: requires the most calculus, lots left as "an exercise to the reader"
• Sakurai: Probably the best place to start if you want an in depth yet introductory course.

But it really depends on YOU, I for one could only learn scattering from Landau, but found the book less than perfect for many other topics. Others in my class had quite the opposite reaction. It depends on what "clicks" for you, and how deep you want to go into what topics.

Balam

The best

[Henry V .009]

Quantum Theory This is Bohm's book. This is simply the best QM book ever written. You'll need Fourier analysis. If you are really interested in learning QM, that requirement will give you more confidence in this book, not less.

I'm sure you've heard of the EPR (sometimes called EPR-Bohm) experiments. The last chapters (and best chapters) of the book are where Bohm lays out his idea for an experiment to actually test EPR -- which is more or less the method used today. (written around 1952, I believe. The experiments weren't conducted until the 1980's.)

Although Bohm's book is one of the best defenses of orthodox quantum mechanics, Bohm went on to propose a non-local, hidden variable version of QM several years after writing the textbook. This theory turned out to have been mathematically identical to de Broglie's pilot wave formulation, which he had thrown out because he thought that non-local EPR effects were obviously impossible. Here is a page with introductions: Intros. Learn the orthodox theory first.

No math at all

[fm6]

This one. (Ducks)

Heisenberg ruined it!

[Scaba]

Don't you know that because of Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle, the more you read about quantum physics, the less you can actually know about it? Stupid Heisenberg...

Here's a few I used during my degree

[KDan]

And which are absolutely excellent to give you a very solid grounding in quantum mechanics and quantum physics.

Mandl's Quantum Mechanics in the Manchester Physics Series
Gasiorowicz's Quantum Physics is absolutely excellent. It goes from simple stuff to pretty complicated stuff and tends to cover things in a thorough, 'no-fudge' way so that you have a solid perspective of how it should be done
Eisberg and Resnick's "Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, Solids, Nuclei, and Particles" is good for bringing it all together with atomic physics, nuclear physics and particle physics
Bransden and Joachain's "Quantum Mechanics" Absolutely excellent. Goes into a LOT of details on everything. If there's anything you don't understand, you're likely to find it here in an understandable form (where other books just mention it in passing, this one will actually spell it out in full, which is well nice when you're in trouble with a concept)

That should get you started pretty well. After that you might want to get Dirac's very own book to seriously absorb the dirac notation (I've found that his book was very clear even so many years after it's been written), then you'll need to get into the subject referred to during my degree as "quantum theory" - basically it is to "normal" quantum mechanics as lagrangian mechanics is to classical mechanics... just much nicer!

Good luck,

Daniel

I'm a physics major...

[kenthorvath]

...and the books on every postdoc's shelf are:

Eisberg, Resneck - Quantum Physics of Atoms, Molecules, a Solids, Nuclei, and Particles (047187373X) (undergraduate level, introductory)

Sakurai - Modern Quantum Mechanics (0805375015) (graduate level, good for matrix mechanics)

French, Taylor - Quantum Physics (?) (Introductory)

The much touted Griffiths is good as well, but is also very terse and doesn't go very much in depth. There is almost no motivation for QM to begin with. I suggest starting with French and Taylor or Eisberg,Resneck. Then read Sakurai before you are ready to go into field theory.