Quantum Mechanics: Lecture Notes

Eyal Buks

Manoranjan Dutta

This is lecture notes for undergraduate students

Enrico Fermi

Bob Coecke

These lecture notes survey some joint work with Samson Abramsky as it was presented by me at several conferences in the summer of 2005. It concerns ‘doing quantum mechanics using only pictures of lines, squares, triangles and diamonds’. This picture calculus can be seen as a very substantial extension of Dirac’s notation, and has a purely algebraic counterpart in terms of so‐called Strongly Compact Closed Categories (introduced by Abramsky and I in [3, 4]) which subsumes my Logic of Entanglement [11]. For a survey on the ‘what’, the ‘why’ and the ‘hows’ I refer to a previous set of lecture notes [12, 13]. In a last section we provide some pointers to the body of technical literature on the subject.

Enrico Fermi

Gordon Baym

These lecture notes comprise a three-semester graduate course in quantum mechanics at the University of Illinois. There are a number of texts which present the basic topics very well; but since a fair quantity of the material discussed in my course was not available to the students in elementary quantum mechanics books, I was asked to prepare written notes. In retrospect these lecture notes seemed sufficiently interesting to warrant their publication in this format. The notes, presented here in slightly revised form, consitutute a self-contained course in quantum mechanics from first principles to elementary and relativistic one-particle mechanics. Prerequisite to reading these notes is some familiarity with elementary quantum mechanics, at least at the undergraduate level. Preferably the reader should already have met the uncertainty principle and the concept of a wave function. Prerequisites also include sufficient acquaintance with complex cariables to be able to do simple contour integrals and to understand words such as "poles" and "branch cuts." An elementary knowledge of Fourier transforms and series is necessary. I also assume an awareness of classical electrodynamics.