Quantum Mechanics: Concepts and Applications by Zettili

[Greg Bernhardt]

• Author: Nouredine Zettili
• Title: Quantum Mechanics: Concepts and Applications
• Amazon Link: https://www.amazon.com/dp/0470026790/?tag=pfamazon01-20

 

[physiker_192]

Pros:

- Each chapter is supported by an abundance of fully solved problems.
- Available in paper back.
- Derivations steps are shown (complete)Cons:

- Short on explaining important physical phenomena properly (e.g. Ehrenfest Theorem)
- The approaches to some topics are not clear and can be abstruse (e.g. Time dependent Perturbation Theory & Quantization of EM field).
- Does not cover Relativistic QM
- The chapter on Many particle QM is short.Rating: 3.0/5.0

 

[djh101]

The main thing I love about Zetilli is the numerous worked out problems available throughout the book. I haven't gotten too far through the book yet (it's mainly just supplementing for my quantum chemistry course at the moment), but so far it reads nicely and presents the topics well. In addition, the entire book is available for free in pdf format from swarthmore.edu, so it really is the most economically accessible quantum mechanics book available.

 

[thegreenlaser]

We used this book for my school's sequence of two quantum classes. This book is good at teaching you how to grind through calculations. Most books will leave lengthy calculations to the reader, or they'll only do the simple cases explicitly, and then sort of hand-wave at the more general cases. This book actually goes through a lot of lengthy calculations, which is really nice when you're trying to work through problem sets.

Unfortunately, all the time spent on working problems seems to leave the exposition a little lacking. The introductions to subjects don't really work for me, and I find this book is only really helpful once I've gone through the same topic in a different book. Also (somewhat paradoxically) while he tends to go through things much more explicitly than other books, when he does choose to hand-wave he seems to do it quite badly. For example, he'll say "from equation (a) we get equation (b)" as if it's an obvious result, but when you look into it more you find that it's actually quite difficult to get from (a) to (b) and you have to make a number of assumptions. It would be nice if he made it clear when he was skipping significant steps.

Personally, I'm not a fan of this book for learning quantum mechanics, but it's nice to have when grinding through lengthy calculations.