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Mathcamp 2023 Outline

This document outlines a 4-week course on classical and quantum mechanics. Week 1 will cover Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism as well as phase space. Week 2 will discuss symmetries, conservation laws, and Noether's theorem. Week 3 introduces quantization of classical systems and axioms of quantum mechanics. Week 4 covers operators on Hilbert space and canonical quantization. The course will take an intuitive approach using examples rather than formal proofs. Homework will be assigned weekly and graded out of 100 points. A final exam will be given at the end of the 4th week.

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42 views2 pages

Mathcamp 2023 Outline

This document outlines a 4-week course on classical and quantum mechanics. Week 1 will cover Lagrangian and Hamiltonian formalism as well as phase space. Week 2 will discuss symmetries, conservation laws, and Noether's theorem. Week 3 introduces quantization of classical systems and axioms of quantum mechanics. Week 4 covers operators on Hilbert space and canonical quantization. The course will take an intuitive approach using examples rather than formal proofs. Homework will be assigned weekly and graded out of 100 points. A final exam will be given at the end of the 4th week.

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m r
Copyright
© © All Rights Reserved
We take content rights seriously. If you suspect this is your content, claim it here.
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From Classical to Quantum Mechanics

Mauricio Romo∗
YMSC, Tsinghua University

I. COURSE OUTLINE

A (very) rough outline of the topics we will cover during this course is given in the following:

Week 1: Introduction to mechanics, generalized coordinates, Lagrangian and Hamiltonian for-


malism. Poisson and symplectic structure of the phase space.

Week 2: Symmetries and conservation laws. Noether’s Theorem. Observables and states.

Week 3: Towards quantization of classical systems. General axioms of quantum mechanics.


Schrödinger’s equation.

Week 4: Operators on Hilbert space. Canonical Quantization. Uncertainty principle.

Our approach will be mostly guided by examples and some intuition, we do not pretend to cover
all the formalism in complete detail.

II. REFERENCES

During the course, we will not follow any particular book (however, lecture notes will be pro-
vided, after each lecture, and also solutions to the homeworks, after each deadline) but the following
ones can be very helpful as alternative sources:

ˆ I. Dolgachev, ‘A Brief Introduction to Physics’.

Available at: http://www.math.lsa.umich.edu/~idolga/physicsbook.pdf

ˆ J. Jose and E. Saletan, ‘Classical Dynamics. A Contemporary Approach’

ˆ V. Arnold ‘Mathematical Methods of Classical Mechanics’

ˆ E. Merzbacher ‘Quantum Mechanics’

∗
Electronic address: mromoj-at-tsinghua.edu.cn
2

ˆ J. J. Sakurai ‘Modern Quantum Mechanics’

ˆ D. J. Griffiths ‘Introduction to Quantum Mechanics’

ˆ L. Takhtajan ‘Quantum Mechanics for Mathematicians’

Brief comments on these books: Our approach to the material is inspired by I. Dolgachev’s lecture
notes and Jose and Saletan book, mainly (however the level of mathematical formality of the
former is way beyond the scope of this course). I will keep the lectures much less formal with many
additions and modifications to make it more accessible to the level of the mathcamp students. Jose
and Saletan and Arnold’s book provide the right amount of mathematical formality and physical
intuition for the mechanics part of the course. The former book being more on the physics side and
the latter more mathematical. The quantum mechanics books are of different levels of formality
and difficulty. Merzbacher is a good advanced undergraduate level book and Sakurai’s book is a
classic that every graduate student in physics should know. Both excellent references. The book by
Takhtajan can be seen as an extended version of Dolgachev’s notes, in the sense that both follow
a very similar outline. All these books serve as references and, there is no way we can cover all of
them in 4 weeks, but bits and pieces of them can be useful as they offer different perspectives.

Last, but not least, this course requires a some knowledge of linear algebra and advanced (multi-
variable) calculus. In case needed, we will review several of these topics during the course, but a
good reference overall is

ˆ S. Lang ‘Undergraduate Analysis’. Springer-Verlag (1996)

III. HOMEWORK AND EVALUATIONS

At different times in the course, we will give problem sets as homework. The rules for the
homeworks are very simple:

ˆ Each homework will have n problems, where n is such that 100/n ∈ Z≥0 and each problem
is worth 100/n points.

ˆ You have 1 week to complete them, then you can submit them directly to the teaching
assistants (TAs). Either, hard copy or digital is fine.

We will have one final exam (probably around the end of the 4th week), and some research prjects
will be suggested at the end of the first week/beginning of the second week.

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