Study Quantum Mechanics: Recommended Literature

[entropy1]

Hello,

I want to try studying QM. I have already read Susskind Minimum QM.

Now I have some trouble focussing while reading and mild dyslexia. So I only want to read the stuff I need (doesn't everyone?). HOW do I find the right sequence of the right books to progress from basic to more advanced? Can you advice me? Maybe this is also useful for other forummers.

Thanks in advance!

 

[troglodyte]

Hi,

Maybe the following books are very nice to read:

David Griffths, quantum mechanics
Feynman lecture III
David McMahon,quantum theory

Also John Boccios and David Tong lecture notes are free available on the web .The Feynman lectures are also free available.You should google for them.

 

[archaic]

Shankar's principles of quantum mechanics was free on springer I think, I am not sure it still is, but be sure to check it out.

 

[Dr. Courtney]

You don't mention what physics and math courses you've completed already, so it's hard to suggest a next step.

 

[entropy1]

You don't mention what physics and math courses you've completed already, so it's hard to suggest a next step.

I've had some math courses thirty years ago on college like linear algebra, calculus etc. (don't feel like doing them all over by the way - I am fine with referencing), and I've read Susskind's "Quantum Mechanics, the Theoretical Minimum" for the greater part which I use as introduction to QM, and I have to re-read that. And I have a copy of Griffiths waiting.

 

[AndreasC]

+1 to Shankar, I printed it some time ago after becoming a bit frustrated with some other textbooks. It's very nice and clear and step by step. Also it's pretty easy to find what you are looking for. Unfortunately it doesn't have many exercises.

 

[George Jones]

Shankar's book is quite good, and, as mentioned above, currently it is freely downloadable at

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-1-4757-0576-8

At a slightly lower level, a book that I very much like is "QUANTUM MECHANICS A Paradigms Approach" by David McIntyre. This contains some modern material that is not in Shankar, e.g., Bell's inequality and quantum teleportation.

 

[Adesh]

As @Dr. Courtney has said mathematics is quite important. If your linear algebra is fine along with advanced calculus then you’re ready for quantum mechanics. Although, we can do QM without much linear algebra but I don’t think that way is quite promising, it won’t let you far. Griffiths’ focus will be mainly on maths.

Feynman Lectures on Physics volume III, gives you an intuitive understanding of the mathematics (the vector spaces) used in Quantum Mechanics and he derives the Schrödinger equation very intuitively and from his own reasoning, not the original deirvation which was done by Schrödinger.

Once you get good grasp of mathematics and some basic intuition go for Griffiths and at the same time try to have a look on books written by original founders of Quantum Mechanics, for now you can try Heisenberg’s “The Physical Principles of Quantum Theory”.

 

[vanhees71]

Well, I've my doubts about Griffith's QM book, given the many questions here in the forums which tend to indicate that students get rather easily confused by this textbook.

I also cannot recommend to read Heisenberg (or Bohr), if you are not very sure about the physics. These two authors are so much into philosophy rather than physics that their papers are pretty incomprehensible and enigmatic.

If you want to learn from textbooks by the founding fathers, I'd rather use the master pieces by Dirac (The Principles of Quantum Mechanics) and Pauli's Wave Mechanics (or the volume of his lectures on theoretical physics). Another classic is Sommerfeld's wave mechanics book.

As an undergrad textbook I'd recommend the Feynman Lectures vol. 3, where you get the physics rather than philosophical gibberish that only leads to confusion without any additional merit ;-). My favorite introductory graduate-level textbook for QM is Sakurai (which starts with Dirac's bra-ket formalism rather than wave mechanics). To get more about path integrals, I'd recommend Feynman&Hibbs.