Important Links:

Index

• Office hours and contact information
• Texts
• Course Structure and Syllabus
• Grading
• Last year's daily coverage

Office hours and contact information

• Prof. Andreas Karch   karch@phys.washington.edu   B408 PAB  543-8591
• Office hours: Tuesdays 1:25-2:25 and by appointment.
• TA: John Fuini   fuini@uw.edu   B427 PAB  543-9524
• Office hours: TBA

Texts

• This quarter the required text is still
  "Modern Quantum Mechanics," Preferred: ("Revised edition") by J.J. Sakurai (Addison Wesley). [NOT the very recent 2nd edition.]
  However, for the third quarter (PHYS 519), we may change to:
  "Quantum Mechanics: Fundamentals," by Kurt Gottfried and Tung-Mow Yan (Springer)
  since this book contains more advanced material not covered in Sakurai. Gottfried and Yan can serve as an alternate textbook already during the Autumn quarter. It provides an excellent, albeit rather succint and more formal, discussion of the material we will be covering in 517-8. It is, in other words, a complementary text to Sakurai.
• Other useful reference texts can be found here .

Course Structure and Syllabus

• The 80 minute sessions on Mondays and Wednesdays will be used for lectures. The 80 minute sessions on Fridays will be a mix of lecture spill-over, homework Q&A sessions, discussion of past HWs, discussion of qual questions, and review for midterm and final exams.

  An approximate syllabus is chapters 2-4 (maybe 5) of Sakurai, adding additional material as needed to spice up the discussion. In more detail:

  • Path integrals and propagators
  • Electric and magnetic fields. Gauge invariance and Aharanov-Bohm effect.
  • Density matrices; mixed versus pure ensembles.
  • Rotations, and the groups SO(3) and SU(2).
  • Rotations, and the groups SO(3) and SU(2).
  • Tensor operators and the Wigner-Eckart theorem.
  • 3-d Schrodinger equation and application to the hydrogen atom.
  • Discrete symmeries: parity (recap from 517) and time-reversal.
  • Time-independent perturbation theory and applications to hydrogen-like atoms

  To give you an idea of what we will cover, here a link to the daily log kept by Steve Sharpe, who taught the class last year, together with his lecture notes: daily coverage page.

• Homework.
  • There will be almost weekly homework sets, due on Wednesdays in class. They will be posted on the homework link above. There will be 7 HWs during the quarter. For the deadlines see the Schedule
  • You are encouraged to discuss the assignments with classmates, but the solutions you turn in must be your own work.
  • Working on assignments in a timely fashion is an important part of the learning process. Late work will not be accepted, unless prearranged due to exceptional circumstances.
  • Solutions will be posted on the HW link after the due date.
• Exams. There will be two exams in this class:
  • The midterm is tentatively scheduled for Wednesday, Feb 1st, 2012, during class time. It will thus be 80 minutes long.
  • The final exam will be on Tuesday, Mar 13th, 2012, 10:30-12:20am in A114 (our regular lecture hall).
  Exams will be closed book. More details will be posted closer to the dates and discussed in class.