PHYSICS 501 - QUANTUM MECHANICS

Guidelines for Final Exam

Date, time, and place

• Monday, Dec. 19, 10am-12noon, in SEC 212.

Ground rules

• Open book
  • One textbook, presumably Shankar (but could be another one)
• Open notes
  • Lecture notes
  • Any notes prepared by you in your own writing
  • Homework assignments and your own solutions
• Calculators are allowed but will not be useful
• Not allowed:
  • Multiple textbooks
  • Homework solutions that I handed out
• I will provide paper.
• In preparing your notes, be aware that
  • I will provide complicated formulas if needed to solve a problem, e.g.,
    • Real-space wavefunctions for SHO, H atom
    • Tables of Y_lm's or Clebsch-Gordon coefficients
  • Your notes should include a quick-reference to simple things such as
    • Rules for raising and lowering operators acting on SHO states
    • Rules for raising and lowering operators acting on spin states
    • Pauli matrices
    • Commutation relations for angular momentum operators
    • Etc.

Coverage

• Everything we covered this semester (!)
• Exception: Wigner-Eckart theorem will not be covered.
• Also, probably nothing on classical mechanics per se
• See Homework Sets for emphasis
• Emphasis more on operator algebra than on real-space wavefunctions

Practice Exam

I have posted a practice final exam" now.