PHY215AB (Fall 15 and Winter 16)
Quantum Mechanics

Instructor: Hsin-Chia Cheng (cheng [at] physics.ucdavis.edu)

Time & Place: Tue & Thu 10:30-11:50AM, 185 PHYSICS

Office Hours: Wed 2-3PM, 433 Physics, or make an appointment through email, or just find me when I am not too busy with other things

Website: http://cheng.physics.ucdavis.edu/teaching/215AB-f15
Lecture notes, Homework assignments and additional information can be found from the smartsite course page.
The class mailing list is phy215a-f15@smartsite.ucdavis.edu (fall quarter) and phy215b-w16@smartsite.ucdavis.edu (winter quarter). The messages sent to it will be archived in the smartsite.

Homework: Homework assignments will be posted in the course Resources on the smartsite. 
There will be homework assignments mostly every week. Doing the homework problems is an extremely important part of learning. You can't learn the subject by just listening to the lectures without working through things by yourself. They also contain some of the important topics that we won't be able to cover in class. Many homework problems will be challenging. They are not plugging-numbers-into-equations type exercises but require a lot of thinking. In this way you can have better understandings of the subject. You are encouraged to discuss the problem sets with your classmates, TA and me, but you are not allowed to copy other people's homework. Each of you is required to write up your own homework following your own understandings. Each problem set is due about one week after its assignment. The solutions will be posted immediately after the due time and hence no late homework can be accepted. (So even if you couldn't finish you should turn in what you have done.) If you can't do some of the problems correctly, make sure that you study the solutions afterwards to understand them, so that you do learn the subjects better.

TA and Grader: Kara Farnsworth, kmfarnsworth[at]ucdavis.edu, Office: 434 Physics, Office hour: TBA

Textbook: There is no required textbook. The lecture notes will be posted on the SmartSite. The recommended books are "Quantum Mechanics: An Experimentalist's Approach" by Eugene Commins,  "Modern Quantum Mechanics," by J. J. Sakurai (and Jim J. Napolitano for the new 2nd edition) and "Principles of Quantum Mechanics," by R. Shankar, 2nd Edition. The latter two are widely used as textbooks for graduate level quantum mechanics course nowadays and the first one is a new book which is close to our approach. We will not follow exactly the order of these books but the emphasis will be similar. Owning one of these books is not required but recommended.

Grading: Homework 50%, Midterm 20%, Final 30%

Outlines of the course:

Topics	Approx. # of Lectures	Related Chapters in Sakurai	Related Chapters in Shankar	Related Chapter in Commins
215A
Introduction, Mathematical Preliminaries	3	1.1-1.5	Ch1	Ch1, Ch2
The Rules of Quantum Mechanics	3	3.4, 3.9	4.1, 4.2	Ch3
Time Development Operator, Hamiltonian, Fundations of Wave Mechanics	4	1.6, 1.7, 2.1, 2.4, 2.6, A.1	4.3, 5.1, Ch9	Ch4, Ch5
One Dimensional Problems	3	4.2, 2.3, A.2-A.4	Ch5, Ch7	Ch6
Theory of Angular Momentum	5	3.1-3.3, 3.5-3.7, B	Ch12, Ch14, 15.1-15.2	Ch7.1-Ch7.8
215B
Wave Mechanics in Three Dimensions	3	A.5, A.6	Ch13	Ch8
The Variational and WKB Methods	2	2.4, 5.4	Ch16	Ch9
Time-independent Perturbation Theory	4	5.1-5.3	Ch17	Ch9, Ch10
Irreducible Spherical Tensors and the Wigner-Eckhart Theorem	2.5	3.10	Ch15.3	Ch7.9-Ch7.12
Time-dependent Perturbation Theory	2.5	5.6-5.8	Ch18	Ch16, Ch17
Scattering Theory	4	Ch7	Ch19	Ch18

Other Information

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