Graduate Course:
Quantum Physics
Book and Reference List (2001-3)
John A. Venables
Dept of Physics and Astronomy, Arizona State
University, Tempe, Arizona
This is one of several files containing lists of, and links to, web-based
resources for use in connection with my graduate courses, web-based articles
and talks. This file is a book and reference list for this ASU-based
course in the Spring Semester 2001-2003.
Latest version of this document 10th March 2001, amended 15 Dec 03.
The main book for the course is:
-
Quantum Physics, 2nd Edition by Stephen Gasiorowicz, a 1996 book
published by John Wiley (ISBN 0-471-85737-8). A list of corrections,
with of course suitable disclaimers, can be found
here.
Optional books are:
-
Quantum Mechanics Simulations (ISBN 0-471-54884-7), which I use
for demonstrations and optional problems. We have had some problems this
semester, since the disc supplied with the book will not run on PC's
with speeds in excess of 233MHz without a patch. I have the patch, and if you
have bought the book/ floppy, I can send you a zipped file to run on your machine.
- A book with a different approach, containing some complementary material is
Introductory Quantum Mechanics, 3rd Edition by Richard L. Liboff,
a 1998 book published by Addison-Wesley (ISBN 0-201-87879).
Students can understand the formal course material on the basis of
Gasiorowicz alone, and indeed this book contains much more material than can
be covered in a one semester course with a survey character. But some
examples have been taken from other books to give the flavor of the history of
Quantum Physics, of subfields within Quantum Physics, and of other topics.
These books are listed below, with the sections referred to in the course.
The first topic where we went beyond the above books was
Atomic Spectroscopy
-
Most modern spectrocopy books typically don't give much feel for how the data
was originally obtained, or indeed, for what a spectrum looks like. For this, we used the
classic book Atomic spectra and atomic structure by G. Herzberg. This
book was originally published in Germany in 1936, but the translation we used came out
in 1937 and in a Dover paperback in 1944. Herzberg is renowned in Canada as the founder
of the strong 'school' of Spectroscopy he set up, first in Saskatchewan and then in Toronto.
- We also used Einführung in die Spektroscopie der Atomhülle by P.H. Heckmann and
E. Träbert, a 1980 book published by Vieweg (ISBN 3-528-035383-8). Apart from convincing
ourselves that science, and the lot of graduate students trying to follow this stuff,
is the same world-wide, this book provides several tables containing accurate
values of term energies for particular types of atomic and ionic spectra.
- We can note that the data described by Herzberg was all obtained before the laser
was invented in the '60's, whereas the more accurate data we used from Heckmann and
Träbert was almost all obtained with laser-based techniques.
The next topic was
The Variational Principle
-
The variational principle was illustrated by Helium, by Nuclear matter, and by
Density Functional Theory (DFT). These three examples are best served by different books
and web pages. The additional book, giving details of the application to helium, and
helium-like atoms is Quantum Mechanics by R.W. Robinett, a 1997 book published by
Oxford (ISBN 0-19-509202-3).
One further section will be finished as a web page in
due course.
Return to Timetable 2 for
2003, 2002 or
2001, or to Course Home Page for
2003, 2002 or
2001.