This course presumes a solid undergraduate course in quantum mechanics, at the level of Griffiths. The content is not traditional, and will only review tangentially the usual subjects. A more traditional graduate course is available in Chemistry (Chem 7930, Nandini Ananth, TTh 11:40-12:55, Baker 219); other possible alternatives are offered in the spring.

• Homeworks
  • Usually due Friday; answer keys distributed the following Monday.
  • Feel free to work in groups, but write up your answers separately.
  • Historically people do well on the homeworks they turn in: being reliable helps. Don't miss more than one homework, or skip questions.
  • Counts 50% of the grade.
  • Usually people do well on the homeworks, so that portion of the grade is largely a measure of persistence and consistency. We will drop the lowest homework from the average, to compensate for emergencies.
  • Late homeworks: We will ordinarily accept homeworks up to three days late (the following Monday, when we shall pass out solution sheets). Notice that E&M has homeworks due Tuesday. In unusual circumstances (traveling to meetings), special arrangments are possible.
• Computer Exercises
  • Most weeks we will have a computational exercise, either numerical or symbolic.
  • We'll provide hints for Mathematica and Python, and occasionally for Matlab/Octave, on the homework exercises page. Matlab syntax is similar to Python. Octave is a free version of Matlab.
  • Mathematica, Python, and Matlab are available in the Physics Educational Computing Facility
  • We like Python (and Sympy, a symbolic python). We recommend the Anaconda distribution. Make sure to get the acadamie version (click on "All products are fee for academic use" on the right). We recommend using the Accelerate package (conda update conda; conda install accelerate).
• Exams
  • Evening midterm, 15% of the grade, Tuesday Sept 30 7:30-9:30, Rock 115.
  • Take-home final exam, 35% of the grade. Likely due around December 12.
  • We standardize the mean and standard deviation of the three scores (HW and two exams) and typically truncate very low scores before averaging.

Information and Links

• Course main page
• Lectures