Grad Quantum Intro: Best Books for Undergraduates?

[LBloom]

Hey everybody,

I'm an undergraduate taking an intro grad qm course and I was wondering what books people recommend. I've taken one semester of qm (griffiths level)

My school recommends three, landau lifgarbagez, sakurai and merzbacher. We have three L-Ls in the library that can be taken out, maybe 2 Merzbachers and one sakurai on reserve (2 hours at a time)

I'm leaning towards L-L. The series seems to be more aimed at theoretical physics and I like what I've seen so far. Don't know much about sakurai though. OTOH i could always buy sakurai and just take out L-L (and hope its not recalled or something)

What do you guys recommend?

 

[niklaus]

I haven't worked through any of them, but I have both Landau and Sakurai sitting on my bookshelf and use them from time to time to look things up. Which one you prefer will probably depend a lot on the way the professor teaches QM.

Landau has a very old-school feel to it, doing lots of detailed calculations but using pretty old-fashioned notation and formalism. He explicitly points out in the preface that he is not impressed with all that fancy modern stuff and prefers to use the style of the original papers of the 1920's and 30's. He does an enormous amount of explicit calculations of all sorts of applications, so it's good if you are looking for that.

Sakurai uses a more abstract, modern formalism using Hilbert spaces and the Dirac notation from the start (which as far as I can tell Landau never bothers to do) and is much more concise with the examples and applications.

The class I am taking is much closer in style to Sakurai (and I would think most courses are nowadays), so it's more useful to me. I'd check them all out in the library and see which one fits you and your class the best.

 

[George Jones]

For foundations (at the grad level), Ballentine is nice.

 

[WiFO215]

Ballentine's book is fantastic! Personally, I feel it is better than Sakurai's book. Take a look.

 

[LBloom]

Well I just checked online and my school has a total of 11 copies of Landau and Lifgarbagez so that actually seems like a waste to buy.

My school has a copy of ballentine so I'll be sure to check that out and compare it to sakurai. Of course I should probably email my professor for his opinion, see which one he prefers (list of which profs are teaching isn't up yet).

In terms of what you said niklaus, it definitely sounds like sakurai would be preferable. It's probably good to know the past formalisms, but sakurai's probably more relevant.

Thanks for the advice, looking forward to cracking open some books