Wednesday, December 9, 2015

resource recommendations - Good quantum physics textbooks




Possible Duplicate:
Learn algebra and interpretation of QM



I'm a physics student it's my last year and I find my self struggling with usage of quantum mechanics. Now I'm starting to learn nuclear physics, solid state physics and soon quantum field theory and I see that I have holes in my knowledge. It's not that I'm completely ignorant, I've passed the exam in quantum physics I understand the concepts, but it doesn't feel right, I don't have the intuition like I do for example, classical mechanics or electrodynamics.
For example, of course, there are problems that I can't solve in classical mechanics or electrodynamics but I always know where to start I have an intuition about the problem and in most scenarios I have an ideas what solutions should look like. But in quantum physics, usually even for simple problems I can get stuck or don't know where to start.
I want to rebuild my knowledge from a new source.
The literature I've used so far is:

Introduction to Quantum Mechanics by David J.Griffiths,
Quantum physics by Leonard Schiff,
Modern Quantum Mechanics (Revised Edition) by J.J.Sakurai.

First one is an easy read, good introduction, but it doesn't use bra/ket notation.
Second on I just didn't like, it was hard to read, short on examples.
Third one I really like, but I'd like to see more examples and I can't check solutions for problems at the end of the chapters anywhere.

Could you please recommend me couple of more choices? I prefer books with lot of examples of solving problems. Also, while it's fine that book starts with wave functions, solving Schrodinger equations etc, I'd like a book that uses bra/ket notation.



Answer



Schiff and Sakurai are graduate level books. A more "doable" textbook would be Shankar's book.


Griffiths is the standard textbook for undergraduate QM. It is very nice book but, like most of QM textbooks, it must be supplemented by solved problems.


Your best choice is Zettili's book. It contains solved problems on all topics including bra-ket notation. That is the reason basically why it has such high rating on amazon. It bridged a needed gap in QM textbooks.


You can check also Landau's book. As far as I remember, it contains problems with insightful short answers spread throughout the book.



No comments:

Post a Comment

classical mechanics - Moment of a force about a given axis (Torque) - Scalar or vectorial?

I am studying Statics and saw that: The moment of a force about a given axis (or Torque) is defined by the equation: $M_X = (\vec r \times \...