|
 |
To: Acknowledgments
 |
This book was primarily written for engineering graduate students who find themselves caught up in nano technology. It is a simple fact that the typical engineering education does not provide anywhere close to the amount of physics you will need to make sense out of the literature of your field. You can start from scratch as an undergraduate in the physics department, or you can read this book.
This book covers the real quantum mechanics; it is not just a summary of selected results as you can find elsewhere. The first part of this book provides a solid introduction to classical (i.e. nonrelativistic) quantum mechanics. It is intended to explain the ideas both rigorously and clearly. It follows a “just-in-time” learning approach. The mathematics is fully explained, but not emphasized. The intention is not to practice clever mathematics, but to understand quantum mechanics. The coverage is at the normal calculus and physics level of undergraduate engineering students. If you did well in these courses, you should be able to understand the discussion, assuming that you start reading from the beginning. There are some hints in the notations section, if you forgot some calculus. If you forgot some physics, just don’t worry too much about it: quantum physics is so much different that even the most basic concepts need to be covered from scratch.
Derivations are usually “banned” to notes at the end of this book, in case you need them for one reason or the other. They correct a considerable number of mistakes that you will find in other mainstream books. No doubt they add some new ones. Let me know and I will fix them in a jiffy; that is the advantage of a web book.
Some sections are marked [descriptive]. These sections do not provide new analytical techniques. Instead they describe important ideas and conclusions that follow from the quantum mechanics. Read through these sections more than once, so that you have a good idea of what they are all about. Do not worry too much about the details of any illustrative analysis that there might be.
The second part of this book discusses more advanced topics. It starts with numerical methods, since engineering graduate students are typically supported by a research grant, and the quicker you can produce some results, the better. A description of density functional theory is still missing, unfortunately.
The remaining chapters of the second part are intended to provide a crash course on many topics that nano literature would consider elementary physics, but that nobody has ever told you about. Most of it is not really part of what is normally understood to be a quantum mechanics course. Reading, rereading, and understanding it is highly recommended anyway.
The purpose is not just to provide basic literacy in those topics, although that is very important. But the purpose is also explain enough of their fundamentals, in terms that an engineer can understand, so that you can make sense of the literature in those fields if you do need to know more than can be covered here. Consider these chapters gateways into their topic areas.
There is a final chapter on how to interpret quantum mechanics philosophically. Read it if you are interested; it will probably not help you do quantum mechanics any better. But as a matter of basic literacy, it is good to know how truly weird quantum mechanics really is.
The usual “Why this book?” blah-blah can be found in a note at the back of this book, {A.1} A version history is in note {A.2}.