These lecture notes are based on special courses on Field Theory and Statistical Mechanics given for graduate students at the City College of New York. It is an ideal text for a one-semester course on Quantum Field Theory.
Scope and aims of this book Quantum optics is one of the liveliest fields in physics at present. While it has been a dominant research field for at least two decades, with much graduate activity, in the past few years it has started to impact the undergraduate curriculum. This book developed from courses we have taught to final year undergraduates and beginning graduate students at Imperial College London and City University of New York. There are plenty of good research monographs in this field, but we felt that there was a genuine need for a straightforward account for senior undergraduates and beginning postgraduates, which stresses basic concepts. This is a field which attracts the brightest students at present, in part because of the extraordinary progress in the field (e.g. the implementation of teleportation, quantum cryptography, Schrödinger cat states, Bell violations of local realism and the like). We hope that this book provides an accessible introduction to this exciting subject. Our aim was to write an elementary book on the essentials of quantum optics directed to an audience of upper-level undergraduates, assumed to have suffered through a course in quantum mechanics, and for first-or second-year graduate students interested in eventually pursuing research in this area. The material we introduce is not simple, and will be a challenge for undergraduates and beginning graduate students, but we have tried to use the most straightforward approaches. Nevertheless, there are parts of the text that the reader will find more challenging than others.
The first volume (General Theory) differs from most textbooks as it emphasizes the mathematical structure and mathematical rigor, while being adapted to the teaching the first semester of an advanced course in Quantum Mechanics (the content of the book are the lectures of courses actually delivered.). It differs also from the very few texts in Quantum Mechanics that give emphasis to the mathematical aspects because this book, being written as Lecture Notes, has the structure of lectures delivered in a course, namely introduction of the problem, outline of the relevant points, mathematical tools needed, theorems, proofs. This makes this book particularly useful for self-study and for instructors in the preparation of a second course in Quantum Mechanics (after a first basic course). With some minor additions it can be used also as a basis of a first course in Quantum Mechanics for students in mathematics curricula. The second part (Selected Topics) are lecture notes of a more advanced course aimed at giving the basic notions necessary to do research in several areas of mathematical physics connected with quantum mechanics, from solid state to singular interactions, many body theory, semi-classical analysis, quantum statistical mechanics. The structure of this book is suitable for a second-semester course, in which the lectures are meant to provide, in addition to theorems and proofs, an overview of a more specific subject and hints to the direction of research. In this respect and for the width of subjects this second volume differs from other monographs on Quantum Mechanics. The second volume can be useful for students who want to have a basic preparation for doing research and for instructors who may want to use it as a basis for the presentation of selected topics.
Essential Advanced Physics is a series comprising four parts: Classical Mechanics, Classical Electrodynamics, Quantum Mechanics and Statistical Mechanics. Each part consists of two volumes, Lecture Notes and Problems with Solutions, further supplemented by an additional collection of test problems and solutions available to qualifying university instructors. This volume, Quantum Mechanics: Lecture Notes, is intended to be the basis for a two-semester graduate-level course. It starts from a coverage of numerous wave-mechanical effects in one- and multi-dimensional systems (notably including the energy band theory), and only then proceeds to the bra-ket formalism necessary for discussion of more advanced topics including particle spin, as well as open and multi-particle quantum systems. The volume also includes a section on quantum computation and cryptography, and ends with a special chapter on quantum measurements and interpretations of quantum mechanics.