Graduate Quantum Mechanics Lecture Notes
Preface
This is a set of lecture notes for the graduate quantum mechanics sequence (PHYS 5250 and 5260), taught at the University of Colorado Boulder.
These are draft notes, and are subject to change. 100% correctness is not guaranteed! E-mails about typos, broken links, or any other issues are always welcome.
These notes are authored using Quarto. To learn more about Quarto, visit https://quarto.org/.
I generally try to keep things as self-contained as possible, but these are still lecture notes; you will likely need at least one quantum mechanics textbook to follow what I am doing. The recommended textbook of choice is (Sakurai and Napolitano 1995).
Throughout these notes, a blue box like this one contains an exercise. Click on the “Answer” box below to expand it!
Answer:
This is where the answer would be hidden, for a real exercise!A green box contains a worked example that is meant to illustrate how to approach a typical physics problem.
A red box is used to highlight key concepts or equations that are especially important!
An orange box contains a warning regarding a common mistake, tricky concept, or someplace where the textbook presents things very differently.
Finally, a yellow box contains an aside - a brief discussion of a related topic that is not crucial to the main discussion. These are collapsed by default, so click on them if you’re interested!