Course info:

Instructor         Prof. Nicola Spaldin, Room 2007 MRL, x7920, nicola@mrl.ucsb.edu
Office Hours   Tuesdays,  9  - 11 am

Web page         http://www.mrl.ucsb.edu/~nicola/211A_2006.html

Class Time       Monday and Wednesday 2-3.50 pm
Place                 1437  Phelps

Teaching assistant     Damien Boesch, x7922, dboesch@engineering.ucsb.edu, Room 2003 MRL
TA Office Hours       Tuesdays 4 - 5 and Fridays 1 - 2.30

 

Books:

Required:

D.J. Griffiths, Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, 2nd Edition, Pearson/Prentice Hall, 2005. ISBN 0-13-111892-7. This one will be our primary text book for the course.

Additional recommended reading:

P.W. Atkins and R.S. Friedman, Molecular Quantum Mechanics, Oxford University Press (2000). This book is particularly good for those of you who have a Chemistry background.

H. Kroemer, Quantum Mechanics, Prentice Hall (1994). This book is particularly good for those of you who have a strong background in wave mechanics

Feynman, Leighton and Sands, The Feynman Lectures on Physics, vol. III. This one is very good for concepts and understanding, but follows a very different development than the one that we'll be using in this course.

Grading and rules:

Your grade will be based on your performance in 3 areas: 1) the homework sets (30% of the total grade), 2)  the mid-term (30% of the total grade) and 3) the final exam. (40% of the total grade).

Homework will be assigned on Wednesdays, and will be collected in class the following Wednesday. Late homework will not be accepted, but your lowest score will be dropped when calculating your total to accommodate sickness/busy-ness/travel.

The Mid-term exam. will be on Wednesday Feb. 1st, in class. The final exam. will be on Monday March 20th, 4-7pm. For the mid-term exam. you will be allowed to bring in 1 page of notes, written on one side; for the final you can have notes on 2 sides. You can bring in a calculator to both exams.

Course outline:
 
The book by Griffiths is so good that we will more or less work through it directly, at (roughly) a rate of 1 chapter per week. The summary course outline below also points you to the reading in the other books.

Schedule Changes:

We will have an extra class on Monday January 16th (MLK day) at our usual time/place. 

Homeworks and in-class problems:

Homework 1 problem set. Due in class Wednesday January 18th. Here are the solutions.

Homework 2 problem set. Due in class Wednesday January 25th. Here are the solutions.

Homework 3 problem set. Due in class Wednesday February 8th. Here are the solutions.

Homework 4 problem set. Due in class Wednesday February 15th. This is the Mid-term exam from 2002. Here are the solutions.

Homework 5 problem set. Due Friday February 24th. This is the final exam from 2003. Here are the solutions.

Homework 6 problem set. Here are the solutions.

Here is the practice final exam that Damien will work through on Monday March 13th. This is the final exam from 2005.

The following are good practice problems for time-dependent perturbation theory (actually, a good study approach would be to work through the problems in Griffiths for the chapters that we've covered!):
Problem 9.2, page 343 (actually we already did this in class, but take the time to contemplate and understand the discussion).
Example 9.1, page 357
Problem 9.20, page 365 (this is similar to homework 4, but with explicit time-dependence in the Hamiltonian).
Also, remember to read through (and understand) Chapter 9 of Griffiths!

Some additional notes: