Physics 501
Quantum Mechanics
Fall 2010

• General information
• Lecture Notes (Preliminary)
• Lecture Notes (Final)
• Homework
• Exams

Announcements

• The final exam will be held Monday December 20 from 9:00 to noon in ARC room 206.


• The final exam will be cumulative and will be on all of the material that we've covered this semester. There will, though, be some emphasis on material covered since the midterm exam.


• The rules for the final will be the same as for the midterm. Open notes and open textbook (Shankar). No other books will be allowed. A calculator could likely be useful.

• Homework assignment 3 is now posted. It will be due in class on Monday October 11.


• Solutions to homework assignment 2 are now posted. You can find a link to them on the homework page. Please let me know if you find any mistakes.


• For this coming week, please read all of Chapter 1 in Shankar.


• The midterm exam on Wednesday October 20 will cover the following chapters from Shankar: Ch.1, Ch. 3, Ch. 4 and at least the first half of Ch.5.

• Solutions to homework assignment 1 are now posted. You can find a link to them on the homework page. Please let me know if you find any mistakes.


• I will be in or around my office on Tuesday afternoon this week but I won't be in on Thursday morning.


• I apologize for not discussing in class today the paradoxes that I left you with last week. I just forgot about them. I'll be sure to discuss them on Wednesday.

• Homework assignment 2 has been revised. I've added three additional problems and, very importantly, I've modified problem 4 so that the amount of algebra involved is greatly reduced. Specifically, I now only ask you to treat the case for which the average values of x and p for the initial wave function are both zero.


• Remember that the assignment is due by Thursday at 3:00 pm in my mailbox. You may turn it in at Wednesday's lecture if you prefer.

• By popular request, I'm going to allow the homework to be turned in at the start of lecture on Mondays rather than by noon in my mailbox. Points will be taken off, though, if it is not turned in at the start of lecture.


• Homework Assignment 2 has now been posted. It will be due at the start of class on Monday September 27.


• I don't plan to set up a regular office hour since, frankly, I quite often forget about it. Please feel free to come to see me when you like. In general, the best times to find me in my office are Tuesday afternoons and Thursday mornings. If you want to be sure that I'll be there, send me an email before hand.


• The midterm exam will be during class time on Wednesday October 20. Please reserve the date. I'll let you know later what material will be covered on the exam

• Homework Assignment 1 has now been updated.


• For those of you who might be a bit rusty on complex analysis and are having some trouble on Problem 2 of the homework, here is a nice concise summary of contour integration including a proof of the Cauchy integral formula. It's from Appendix F of Volume I of Gauge Theories in Particle Physics by Aitchison and Hey.

• Homework assignment 1 is now posted. It is due Monday Sept. 20 by noon in my mailbox in Serin. This coming Monday I will likely add one or two more problems to the assignment.


• Lecture notes for next weeks lectures are now posted. Remember to look at them before class.


• Please read Appendix A Section A.2 in Shankar before Monday's lecture.


• Remember that from now on we will always meet in ARC Room 108.

• Good news, I've managed to get a room change. All of the lectures both those on Mondays and Wednesdays will now be in ARC Room 108.


• There is no assigned homework this week. We haven't covered enough material yet. The first assignment will be given on September 10.


• If you want to learn more about the double slit experiment, a good place to start is this article from Physics World. If you want to read further, here are the references to the actual papers.
  
  • C. Jonsson, 1961, Zeitschrift fur Physik 161 454-474
  • C. Jonsson, 1974, Electron diffraction at multiple slits, American Journal of Physics 42 4-11
  • A.P. French and E.F. Taylor, 1974, The pedagogically clean, fundamental experiment, American Journal of Physics 42 3
  • P.G. Merli, G.F. Missiroli and G. Pozzi, 1976, On the statistical aspect of electron interference phenomena, American Journal of Physics 44 306-7
  • A. Tonomura, J. Endo, T. Matsuda, T, Kawasaki and H. Ezawa, 1989, Demonstration of single-electron build-up of an interference pattern, American Journal of Physics 57 117-120