Description

A student’s first course on quantum mechanics provides the foundation essential for touch of his or her future work in physics, be it in atomic, elementary particle, or solid state physics. This introductory textbook contains not only the foundations and many applications of quantum mechanics, but also new aspects and their experimental verification. It has as its particular virtues clarity and conciseness of presentation, while at the same time being sell contained. Comprehensibility is further guaranteed by the inclusion of all the mathematical steps required for a complete understanding. Carefully chosen problems help to consolidate the student’s knowledge. In the introductory chapters, starting from the historical evaluation of the subject, the fundamental postulates are developed inductively by means of an interference experiment. Thereafter the structure is purely deductive, covering all of nonrelativistic quantum mechanics, as well as the quantization of the radiation field in the context of optical transitions. In addition to detailed treatments of the quantum mechanical “essentials”, for instance, scattering theory, time dependent phenomena, and the density matrix, such topics as the theory of quantum mechanical measurement and the Bell inequality are also discussed. A separate chapter is devoted to super-symmetric quantum mechanics, an area which to date has been accessible only in the research literature. Table Of Contents Foreword Preface Chapter 1 Survey of the Elementary Principles Chapter 2 Variational Principles and Lagrange’s Equations Chapter 3 The Two-Body Central Force Problem Chapter 4 The Kinematics of Rigid Body Motion Chapter 5 The Rigid Body Equations of Motion Chapter 6 Small Oscillations Chapter 7 Special Relativity in Classical