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Showing reviews 1-5 of 63
 The best graduate level quantum text July 31, 2009
Todd Van Woerkom
This is by far the best graduate level quantum textbook available. The information is very clear, and the book is easy to read. I would say that an undergraduate course using Griffiths and a graduate course using Shankar will give you all the quantum you'll ever need (for most physicists). This book is also a great reference text. I would definitely recommend it to anyone who wants/needs to learn quantum mechanics at the graduate level.
Excellent for Self Study June 17, 2009
Jason Dowd (Los Angeles, CA)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
As other reviewers have remarked this is an excellent book, and if you are interested in really learning quantum mechanics, this is where I'd recommend you start.
Here are some of the things I particularly liked about this book, and some of the ways I thought it could have been better.
The first chapter provides the necessary mathematical background for quantum mechanics. It is a long chapter, but very well done. Regardless, make no mistake, you should not attempt this book at all without a solid background in differential equations and linear algebra. This chapter is very helpful though as a review and for fixing notation. I also approved of its stated goal: to put the math first rather than trying to interleave it with the physics. Physics is hard enough without trying to tackle the math and the physics at the same time.
Chapter two is a quick review of classical mechanics. Advanced classical mechanics. If you are not already comfortable with the Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formulations of classical mechanics before you attempt this book, well you probably shouldn't attempt this book. But if you are, this chapter is an excellent and concise review done with an eye towards quantum mechanics.
Chapter four presents quantum mehcanics in a postulatory manner, and builds the subject deductively from there. Of the quantum mechanics books I've read, the ones that proceed in this fashion tend to be clearest, and this one is no exception.
Chapter five presents a collection of one dimensional problems. This chapter is one of the few that I felt could have been better. I did not think there was enough discussion of tunneling and scattering, which struck me as odd. Certainly I have seen other introductions to quantum mechanics do a better job with these topics.
Chapter ten is on systems with more degrees of freedom and covers the tricky subject of identical particles in quantum mechanics. It is a very clear treatment.
Chapters twelve and thirteen extend the treatment to three dimensional systems and the Hydrogen atom in particular. While good, I thought the author could have done a better job building intuition for the special functions that appear in this section of the book, like the spherical harmonics. The author even states that many other books provide graphs and additional information for these very important functions. Ok, so why not this one as well? For a book that is so complete in so many other ways, this omission seemed odd.
Chapters fourteen and fifteen cover spin and the addition of angular momentum. Challenging topics in quantum mechanics. For the most part the discussion is very lucid, and among the best I've seen.
Chapters sixteen through eigthteen cover approximation methods. They are superb. Chapter eighteen is a particular standout here. The discussion of the quantization of the electromagnetic field is outstanding, and very unusual in an introductory book.
Chapter nineteen is on scattering, and is probably the clearest introduction to this (rather tricky) subject I have seen.
Chapter twenty is on the Dirac equation. Almost never seen in an introductory book, this is again an outstanding feature of this work.
Finally, as other reviewers have mentioned, this book discusses path integrals in two chapters: eight and twenty-one. These discussions are five star worthy. This topic is also highly unusual in an introductory book, but as the author points out it is of central importance in contemporary physics.
The last chapter -- twenty-one -- is definitely the most advanced in the book. It disusses the Quantum Hall Effect, the imaginary time formalism, the connections between quantum mechanics, quantum statistical mechanics, and classical statistical mechanics via path integrals, and ends with discussion of fermionic path integrals which are central to quantum field theory. All of these are advanced topics, and the author does an excellent job preparing the reader to tackle them. Kudos!
There are numerous problems throughout, most of which are rather simple.
This is an excellent book for anyone looking really to sink their teeth into QM.
 A solid choice March 1, 2009
Abhiram Chivukula
I think the formal introduction to the mathematics at the beginning does a great job of demystifying some of what looks like "sketchy mathematics" when done without proper explanation. One pro/con issue I have with the book is that I feel like I have to read things multiple times to get a good grasp, but when I do get that grasp, I feel like I understand it much better than when I learn something from another book. I also think that it does a great job of making linear algebra interesting! I remember I felt that linear algebra was incredibly dull when I took it as a class by itself, but reading the book makes me want to go back and review it again in depth. It also gives me the urge to go look at abstract algebra again in anticipation that it will also seem much more interesting once I get to a level of physics where we talk about symmetries and use group theory.
.....Better -> Best -> This book!!! October 15, 2008
Shiv Akarsh Meka (College Station,TX USA)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Neils Bohr once said : "if you are not shocked by quantum physics, you don't understand it." . And here is the promise: read the book and you get nothing less than a 20000 Volt DC....One in a million of its kind. The author looks to have penned down questions/problems that he faced while studying quantum mechanics.. Read the complete book and every question of yours would be answered..Scattering theory though could have been a bit better..Overall, this book could be compared to the works of Feynman and Kramer..
Perfect on its aim August 9, 2008
Miguel Angel Caro Bayo (La Laguna, Spain)
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Quatum Mechanics is conceptually hard enough itself to get more trouble than necessary trying to assimilate the language it's written in - maths. For someone who has struggled with Cohen-Tanoudji to understand all the mathematical apparatus concerning the description of quantum mechanical phenomena, it felt quite comforting to end up with this book.
Of course this is not Cohen-Tanoudji, and you cannot find in it everything you would look for, but it doesn't pretend to neither. This is, more than a pure physics text, a progressive approach to Dirac notation, Hilbert spaces and not-easy-to-go-with concepts whose understanding is vital to get along with everything that comes later.
In my opinion, this is a beginning, and a rather good one. But that's it. Do not expect for more. You'll have the fundamentals of Hydrogen atom, momentum coupling, spin, perturbation theory, etc. and the maths underneath them.
For that reason, I find the price a bit high, and would not recommend it for a graduate level, maybe just in case quantum is not your primary field of work.
A "but": despite it's supposedly simple and self-contained, it sometimes lacks deeper explanations of results the author gets to by apparently 'divine intervention'.
For learning purposes, starting students will find a useful tool to deal with Quantum Mechanics and its complexity.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 63
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