This latest volume of proceedings from a Scottish Universities Summer School covers a wide range of topics, many at the forefront of current research in Physics, which the editors enthusiastically refer to as Quantum Toys . Certainly there is a sense of playfulness and relative simplicity in the way many topics are addressed by the distinguished authors of the eleven main chapters. The result is a book covering what is at times fairly advanced material, at a level and with a lucidity that will be particularly attractive to newcomers in the field. Amongst those topics are to be found cavity QED, quantum wells, squeezed light, Bell's theorem and Bose - Einstein condensation. It is good to see more molecular material being reflected in the contents - discovering the relationship between squeezing and Franck - Condon factors was for me a pleasant surprise, surpassed only by the first autostereogram I have ever been able to decode. Personally I do not find the eighteen pages devoted to poster abstracts and participant addresses at all useful - most purchasers would rather have £ 5 off!
This latest volume of proceedings from a Scottish Universities Summer School covers a wide range of topics, many at the forefront of current research in Physics, which the editors enthusiastically refer to as Quantum Toys . Certainly there is a sense of playfulness and relative simplicity in the way many topics are addressed by the distinguished authors of the eleven main chapters. The result is a book covering what is at times fairly advanced material, at a level and with a lucidity that will be particularly attractive to newcomers in the field. Amongst those topics are to be found cavity QED, quantum wells, squeezed light, Bell's theorem and Bose - Einstein condensation. It is good to see more molecular material being reflected in the contents - discovering the relationship between squeezing and Franck - Condon factors was for me a pleasant surprise, surpassed only by the first autostereogram I have ever been able to decode. Personally I do not find the eighteen pages devoted to poster abstracts and participant addresses at all useful - most purchasers would rather have £ 5 off!
Introduction to models on constant negative curvature surfaces, Eugene B. Bogomolny cavity quantum electrodynamics, Michel Brune and Serge Haroche coherent interactions of two trapped ions, Ralph DeVoe two-photon decay of metastable atomic hydrogen and Bell's inequality, Alan J. Duncan studies of fundamental interactions using molecules, Ed A. Hinds quantum fluctuations and applications of squeezed light, H.J. Kimble and G.-L. Oppo quantum superpositions in dissipative environments - decoherence and deconstruction, Peter L. Knight and Barry M. Garraway optical physics of quantum wells, David A.B. Miller simple quantum dynamics, Stig Stenholm atomic hydrogen in magnetostatic traps, Jook T.M. Walraven.
Abstract This book provides the reader with a contemporary and comprehensive introduction to Quantum Mechanics. It is suitable for beginners as well as for more advanced university students. Quantum mechanics is presented in a pedagogical fashion, with a clear logical organization. The various concepts and methods are introduced first in elementary terms, and later developed into more precise formulations. Systematic studies of approximation methods and the discussion of a wide class of physical applications follow. Part I of the book, together with the opening sections of Part II, provide adequate material for an introductory course of one semester at most universities. The rest of the book might be used in an advanced course on Quantum Mechanics. The basic material is fairly standard, even though some discussions such as those on general systems with time-dependent Hamiltonians, on metastable systems, as well as the discussions in some of the Complement sections, may not be found in other textbooks. The book also contains many original observations or new ways of illustrating even well-known subjects. In fact, the authors wish to convey in this book the sense of wonder in the logical simplicity and at the same time the beauty of subtle and far-reaching consequences of Quantum Mechanics, to young physics students in particular. Problem sets are provided at the end of each chapter, to be solved either analytically or by numerical methods. The solutions to both types of problems are given as separate pdf files or as Mathematica notebooks (there are 88 of them), all together on a CD accompanying the textbook. The presence of such a collection of numerical analyses enriches the main text and is one of the characteristic features of the book. With the many interesting systems discussed, the book will also be a useful reference for researchers and teachers. It provides the reader with a unique, enjoyable and rather complete textbook of Quantum Mechanics, destined to set a new standard for many years to come.
This established textbook provides an accessible but comprehensive introduction to the quantum nature of light and its interaction with matter. The field of quantum optics is covered with clarity and depth, from the underlying theoretical framework of field quantization, atom–field interactions, and quantum coherence theory, to important and modern applications at the forefront of current research such as quantum interferometry, squeezed light, quantum entanglement, cavity quantum electrodynamics, laser-cooled trapped ions, and quantum information processing. The text is suitable for advanced undergraduate and graduate students and would be an ideal main text for a course on quantum optics. This long-awaited second edition builds upon the success of the first edition, including many new developments in the field, particularly in the area of quantum state engineering. Additional homework problems have been added, and content from the first edition has been updated and clarified throughout.
This is a well written book; it makes easy and pleasant reading for both experts and physicists working in other areas. The book is almost self-contained. It comprises six chapters. In the first three the author introduces the subject and deals with basic results and analytic tools from quantum optics: quantum theory of light and quasi-probability functions. In the fourth chapter he discusses the quantum-mechanical description of simple optical instruments. The last two chapters are the core of the book; they are devoted to a discussion of quantum tomography, joint measurement of position and momentum and the quantum-optical phase. The author was directly involved in the development of the field, which guarantees a fresh and clear exposition. At the same time he makes an open effort for a general (re)formulation of the subject and to present the `classic' solutions to a number of problems in the area. Overall, the presentation of quantum tomography is shaped by a personal view but it accounts sufficiently for the different approaches discussed in the literature. My only reservation is the way in which connections between classical and quantum tomography are presented. In particular, I find that an explicit statement that classical tomography (inverse Radon transform) cannot be straightforwardly applied to the quantum case should be made. The book was published in 1997. Since then the field has been growing rapidly and impetuously and the book shows its age. Nevertheless, it is still a useful reference tool for active researchers and a nice and valuable introduction for (graduate) students who are entering this area. It is worth noting that only a few books have been published on this subject; Leonhardt's volume is well written and to the point. The book is dedicated to Harry Paul, the supervisor of Leonhardt's postdoctoral thesis and the coauthor of most of his papers in the area. M G A Paris
This is an enjoyable book by a particle physicist of some distinction, who wrote several books on the theoretical aspects of his subject. He died soon after the book was finished. This book would seem a splendid tribute to his memory. The first five chapters are an excellent introduction to quantum mechanics from the viewpoint of a particle physicist. (A solid state physicist might include some other topics.) The next three chapters give some feeling for the excitement of particle physics and describe some of the zoo of curious creatures discovered in the depths of particle accelerators, and the forces between them: strong, electromagnetic and weak. The final chapter, 'Quantum Fields', is a tour de force. The author has a light touch and a pleasant sense of humour. He does not attempt to explain everything he mentions, but he makes it very clear when he does not. These points are beautifully illustrated by the following extract from the final chapter (p 245). 'It was said above that virtual particles come into play when the real collision ingredients are all close together. In fact, virtual particles are always in play. Even a single real particle, moving along in isolation, can emit and reabsorb virtual particles over and over again. This has the effect of shifting the physical mass of the particle away from the 'bare' value that entered into the Hamiltonian. That shift inevitably turns out to be slightly infinite, and there is a whole technology for isolating and redefining away this and a few other infinities that are characteristic of renormalisable quantum field theories. But we forebear to pursue these delicacies any further here.' I particularly like 'slightly infinite'. The publisher's blurb describes this book as being suitable for popular science readers. It is not. Its level of mathematics would make it very heavy going for anyone who had not taken at least one course in mathematics at university. This is a book which can be strongly recommended as a supplementary text for undergraduates studying quantum mechanics, and also as a book for professional physicists who wish to obtain an up-to-date description and explanation of particle physics. It ought to be in every library. P Borcherds
After a short review of some essential concepts of classical physics (with a discussion of the so-called `scientific method', which is rarely found in textbooks of this kind), including the classical description of particles and waves, together with a sketch of statistical thermodynamics, the basics of quantum mechanics are introduced. The third chapter then treats systems of identical particles and their statistics, as well as the statistics of discrete energy levels. This is followed by an extensive presentation of the behaviour of quantum particles in periodic potentials with obvious applications to crystalline materials, including metals, insulators, semiconductors and superconductors. The band structure of some special materials, intrinsic carrier concentrations and electrons in metals are further topics of this main chapter. In most quantum mechanics textbooks the subjects of the fifth chapter, quantum wells, harmonic oscillators and the hydrogen atom, are usually introduced before a discussion of periodic potentials, but the author's exposition makes it quite plausible to place them afterwards. The concept of tunnelling through potential barriers and important application examples, ranging from ohmic contacts to scanning tunnelling microscopy and even radioactivity, make up the next chapter. Some approximation methods, i.e. stationary perturbation theory with applications to coupled wells, and the variational method, are treated in the next chapter. The final chapter dealing with quantum mechanics then is concerned with scattering and collision problems, again, of course, with examples from solid state physics. This last chapter, however, looks somehow merely added on, since it introduces only quite briefly the theory of special relativity -almost certainly in order not to leave out this important revolution of modern physics. Three appendices, on Fermi's Golden Rule, Boltzmann's transport theory and quantum interference devices, round off the contents. The book abounds with links to modern technologies that have evolved out of quantum mechanics (with, of course, the exception of the last chapter on special relativity). To the reviewer this constitutes its outstanding value as a textbook on quantum mechanics for engineering students. In addition, about 100 solved numerical examples in the text illustrate very lucidly some of the more abstract concepts, and at the end of the chapters altogether 200 further problems are posed. Although some of the concepts and results of quantum mechanics are introduced in a seemingly ad hoc manner, nevertheless the book as a whole certainly represents a valuable teaching tool at engineering schools; even physics majors may profit from the wealth of technical applications not usually found in their textbooks on quantum mechanics.