Recent content by Steger

What exactly do you mean? Any mathematics suite (Matlab, Maple, Mathematica, etc.) will help you do calculations in quantum mechanics.

Perhaps we should nail down the question you are asking. Are you curious about the ORIGIN of the magnetic fields you see around you at a quantum level and how magnetic materials acquire them? Or are you wondering if there is a quantum mechanical version of Maxwell's equations? If the former...

Perhaps, to clarify a bit more, the words "Quantum Magnetism" do not refer to the quantum field theory of the electromagnetic field but to: Condensed matter field theory, quantum many-body theory, exchange interactions, domain formation, spintronics, superconductivity, quantum phase transitions...

I'm afraid you're quite mistaken, you are confusing a quantum theory of MAGNETISM with a quantum theory of the MAGNETIC FIELD. These are quite different. The magnetic field can be understood at a classical or quantum level through classical field theory (i.e. maxwell's equations) or QED...

No, basic mechanics is very boring, and I often question teaching it first. Quantum mechanics and relativity tends to be the things that excite in undergraduate physics. Although, as a physicist, you grow to hate these sorts of books I'd recommend reading something like "Elegant Universe" or...

The fact that electrons don't have a set position is due to quantum mechanics, it is not that WE don't know its position it's that IT doesn't know its position. I'm afraid it has nothing to do with it "zooming around super fast". It's a fundamental aspect of the quantum world of all particles...

I don't know what country you're in but for graduate school where one does research one often applies more to a specific professor rather than a department or program. If you are in a country where this is the norm I would suggest going through departmental websites and looking at the research...

I believe this is a rather complicated problem but I'm not sure if sine functions would be a good basis to use, the electrons would want to stay on opposite sides of the box but then you would have to also worry about their wavefunctions being antisymmetric. It's not a trivial problem.

That your charge is not conserved and that your current density is complex (because hopefully your charge density isn't). Without context there's not much more to say. However, my first guess would be that you're trying to do something very exotic or you did something wrong.

Yes, the fundamental interactions that drive magnetism are completely and totally quantum mechanical and have absolutely no analogy in classical physics. They derive from some subtle interplay of Fermion statistics, Pauli exclusion principle, quantum tunneling and Coulomb repulsion...

It's pretty common to say that absolute zero can't exist since temperature is the average kinetic energy and Heisenberg's unceratinty... etc. However, the impossibility of absolute zero was known well before quantum mechanics and is simply a result of thermodynamics. The 3rd law is often...

Residual entropy is indicative of a frustrated system which will likely have an interesting T=0 quantum phase diagram. It is true that the 3rd law of thermodynamics prevents actually achieving T=0, however, it can be shown that these quantum phases will survive into the T>0 region provided...

You are quite correct, the potential energy is dependent on position where the kinetic energy is not (at least not directly). Therefore, minimizing potential energy will give you the particles route through space. What I was hinting at was something called the Principle of Least (or, more...

Just because two states have the same energy has nothing to do with whether the system will MOVE between the two states. A system moves along a path that minimizes its energy (essentially) at every instant. The two states you showed would NOT be connected by such a path so the system can't...

Again, I am trying to do a MOLECULAR DYNAMICS simulation of evaporation. If you don't know what this is (and yet you posted anyways) an example animation can be found here http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kinetic_theory The difficulty comes in finding the partial differential equation that governs...