LECTURES ON QUANTUM MECHANICS

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.

Gordon Baym has remained at Illinois since his arrival; a frequent visitor to Nordita and the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen, he has also been a visiting professor at the Universities in Tokyo, Kyoto and Nagorya. His principal research interests have been in the physics of condensed matter in systems ranging from liquid helium to neutron stars and high energy nuclear collisions. He is also the author of Lectures in Quantum Mechanics. Leo P. Kadanoff left Urbana for Brown University in 1969 and thereafter joined the faculty of the University of Chicago in 1978, where he is presently the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Distinguished Service Professor of Physics. After his early research in Green’s functions, he returned to study of critical phenomena near phase transitions, and then toward models of urban growth; his research is now aimed at turbulence and chaos in many-particle systems. For his work is critical phenomena, he received the Buckley prize of the American Physical Society, the Wolf Foundation award, and the Elliot Cresson medal of the Franklin Institute.