Quantum Mechanics course

11 May 2010 Lectured from 2007 to 2010 as the second part of the 3rd year mathematics undergraduate "Quantum Mechanics" course at the University of Bristol.

Problem Sheets

Problem sheets 7 and 8 correspond to my section of the course. I have removed the solution sheets, as the same problems may be used by future lecturers. If you want a copy of the solutions for purposes other than avoiding having a good go at the problems yourself, email me.


Creative Commons License The lecture notes and problem sheets are copyright ©Toby Cubitt, and are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Recommended books

Angular momentum (lectures 1 to 5)

The main text book for this part of the course is the book by Hannabuss. But any good text book on quantum mechanics will cover this material. A sample of ones I like is listed below, but if you find one that presents the material in a way that you find easier, you should by all means make use of it.

  • "An Introduction to Quantum Theory", Hannabuss.
    The angular momentum section of the course closely follows chapter 8.
  • "Modern Quantum Mechanics", Sakurai
  • "Quantum Mechanics",Cohen-Tannoudji
  • "Group Theory in Physics", Cornwell.
    Chapter 12, Volume 2. For interest only; well beyond the level of the course.
  • "Feynman Lectures vol. 3", Feynman, Leighton, Sands.
    As an accompaniement to the other books, volume 3 of Feynman's famous lecture series contains a presentation of quantum mechanics with a different and somewhat less mathematical flavour, which some may find helpful or interesting.

Measurement, tensor products, non-locality, entanglement and Bell inequalities (lectures 5 to 10)

There is no single ideal text book covering this part of the course. The books and references listed below cover parts of it in a way that's not too far removed from the course, but serve more as an accompaniement to the lecture notes than an alternate source for the material.

  • "Quantum Computation and Quantum Information", Nielsen & Chuang
    Chapter 2 gives a concise but excellent treatment of measurement, tensor products and entanglement, though at a level a little above the course. Bell inequalities are also covered in this chapter, but this is not the focus of the book and the proof they give obscures some of the subtleties.
  • "Quantum Theory: Concepts and Methods", Asher Peres.
    A delightful text book that contains a good treatement of the Bell experiment and much more.
  • "Bell Inequalities and Entanglement", Werner and Wolf.
    This review article gives a careful and rigorous discussion of Bell inequalities.
  • "Speakable and Unspeakable in Quantum Mechanics", John Bell.
    A collection of insightful essays and papers by John Bell of Bell experiment fame.

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