Ac­knowl­edg­ments

This book is for a large part based on my read­ing of the ex­cel­lent book by Grif­fiths, [25]. It now con­tains es­sen­tially all ma­te­r­ial in that book in one way or the other. (But you may need to look in the notes for some of it.) This book also evolved to in­clude a lot of ad­di­tional ma­te­r­ial that I thought would be ap­pro­pri­ate for a phys­i­cally-​lit­er­ate en­gi­neer. There are chap­ters on rel­a­tiv­ity, nu­mer­i­cal meth­ods, ther­mo­dy­nam­ics, solid me­chan­ics, elec­tro­mag­net­ism, and nu­clei.

Some­what to my sur­prise, I find that my cov­er­age ac­tu­ally tends to be closer to Yariv's book, [52]. I still think Grif­fiths is more read­able for an en­gi­neer, though Yariv has some very good items that Grif­fiths does not.

Matthew Le­ung pointed out that I had left and right mixed up in my dis­cus­sion of the rel­a­tivis­tic Doppler ef­fect. I am dyslexic that way.

The idea of us­ing the La­grangian for the de­riva­tions of rel­a­tivis­tic me­chan­ics is from A. Kom­panayets, the­o­ret­i­cal physics, an ex­cel­lent book.

I rewrote the sec­tion on func­tions as vec­tors to some ex­tent based on com­ments of Ger­mano Galasso.

I thank Rob Vossen for point­ing out some rather hor­ri­ble ty­pos in the sec­tion on Dirac no­ta­tion.

I thank Chris Cline for point­ing out a bad la­bel on the dot prod­uct fig­ure in the dis­cus­sion of func­tions as vec­tors. I thank Richard Mertz and Mike Day for point­ing out ty­pos and poor phras­ing in the same sec­tions.

The nano­ma­te­ri­als lec­tures of col­league An­ter El-Azab that I au­dited in­spired me to add a bit on sim­ple quan­tum con­fine­ment to the first sys­tem stud­ied, the par­ti­cle in the box. That does add a bit to a sec­tion that I wanted to keep as sim­ple as pos­si­ble, but then I fig­ure it also adds a sense that this is re­ally rel­e­vant stuff for fu­ture en­gi­neers. I also added a dis­cus­sion of the ef­fects of con­fine­ment on the den­sity of states to the sec­tion on the free-elec­tron gas.

I thank Swap­nil Jain for point­ing out that the ini­tial sub­sec­tion on quan­tum con­fine­ment in the pipe was def­i­nitely un­clear and is hope­fully bet­ter now.

I thank Ed Williams for point­ing out a mis­take in the for­mula for the com­bi­na­tion prob­a­bil­i­ties of the hy­dro­gen atom elec­trons and Jo­hann Joss for one in the for­mula for the av­er­aged en­ergy of two-state sys­tems.

Thomas Pak noted some poor phras­ing in the sec­tion on met­als and in­su­la­tors.

The dis­cus­sions on two-state sys­tems are mainly based on Feyn­man’s notes, [22, chap­ters 8-11]. Since it is hard to de­ter­mine the pre­cise state­ments be­ing made, much of that has been aug­mented by data from web sources, mainly those ref­er­enced.

I thank Mu­rat Ozer for point­ing out that the two high­est wave func­tions in N.2 were $Z$ $\vphantom0\raisebox{1.5pt}{$=$}$ 14 in­stead of 16.

The dis­cus­sion of the On­sager the­o­rem comes from Desloge, [12], an emer­i­tus pro­fes­sor of physics at the Florida State Uni­ver­sity.

The sec­tion on con­ser­va­tion laws and sym­me­tries is al­most com­pletely based on Feyn­man, [22] and [20].

Har­ald Kirsch re­ported var­i­ous prob­lems in the sec­tions on con­ser­va­tion laws and on po­si­tion eigen­func­tions.

Bob Sokalski re­ported an er­ror in the sec­tion on the two-state model.

The note on the de­riva­tion of the se­lec­tion rules is from [25] and lec­ture notes from a Uni­ver­sity of Ten­nessee quan­tum course taught by Mar­i­anne Breinig. The sub­sec­tion on con­ser­va­tion laws and se­lec­tion rules was in­spired by El­lis, [15].

The many-worlds dis­cus­sion is based on Everett’s ex­po­si­tion, [17]. It is bril­liant but quite im­pen­e­tra­ble.

The sec­tion on the Born-Op­pen­heimer ap­prox­i­ma­tion comes from Wikipedia, [[21]], with mod­i­fi­ca­tions in­clud­ing the in­clu­sion of spin.

The sec­tion on the Hartree-Fock method is mainly based on Sz­abo and Ostlund [46], a well-writ­ten book, with some Parr and Yang [34] thrown in.

The sec­tion on solids is mainly based on Sproull, [42], a good source for prac­ti­cal knowl­edge about ap­pli­ca­tion of the con­cepts. It is sur­pris­ingly up to date, con­sid­er­ing it was writ­ten half a cen­tury ago. Var­i­ous items, how­ever, come from Kit­tel [29]. The dis­cus­sion of ionic solids re­ally comes straight from hy­per­physics [[6]]. I pre­fer hy­per­physics’ ex­am­ple of NaCl, in­stead of Sproull’s equiv­a­lent dis­cus­sion of KCl. My col­league Steve Van Sciver helped me get some han­dle on what to say about he­lium and Bose-Ein­stein con­den­sa­tion.

The ther­mo­dy­nam­ics sec­tion started from Grif­fiths’ dis­cus­sion, [25], which fol­lows Yariv’s, [52]. How­ever, it ex­panded greatly dur­ing writ­ing. It now comes mostly from Baier­lein [4], with some help from Feyn­man, [18], and some of the books I use in un­der­grad­u­ate thermo.

Mark Troll noted that the dis­cus­sion of the spe­cific heat of gases was pretty poorly writ­ten. I have rewrit­ten it pretty much along the lines he sug­gested.

The de­riva­tion of the clas­si­cal en­ergy of a spin­ning par­ti­cle in a mag­netic field is from Yariv, [52].

The ini­tial in­spi­ra­tion for the chap­ter on nu­clear physics was the No­bel Prize ac­cep­tance lec­ture of Goep­pert Mayer [[10]]. This is an ex­cel­lent in­tro­duc­tion to nu­clear physics for a non­spe­cial­ist au­di­ence. It is freely avail­able on the web. As the chap­ter ex­panded, the main ref­er­ence be­came the pop­u­lar book by Krane [31]. That book is par­tic­u­larly rec­om­mended if you want an un­der­stand­able de­scrip­tion of how the ex­per­i­men­tal ev­i­dence led physi­cists to for­mu­late the the­o­ret­i­cal mod­els for nu­clei. Other pri­mary ref­er­ences were [36] and [40]. The Hand­book of Physics, Hy­per­physics, and var­i­ous other web sources were also help­ful. Much of the ex­per­i­men­tal data are from NUBASE 2003, an of­fi­cial data­base of nu­clei, [3]. Up­dates af­ter 2003 are not in­cluded. Data on mag­netic mo­ments de­rive mostly from a 2001 preprint by Stone; see [45]. Nu-Dat 2 [[12]] pro­vided the the ex­cited en­ergy lev­els and ad­di­tional ref­er­ence data to val­i­date var­i­ous data in [45].

Lynn Bowen cor­rected a bad num­ber on the life time of he­lium with an­other pro­ton or neu­tron added, be­cause I stu­pidly mis­read ys (yoc­tosec­ond) in a ref­er­ence as y (year). Very em­bar­rass­ing, es­pe­cially as I was amazed by the num­ber.

The dis­cus­sion of the Born se­ries fol­lows [25].

The brief de­scrip­tion of quan­tum field the­ory and the quan­ti­za­tion of the elec­tro­mag­netic field is mostly from Wikipedia, [[21]], with a bit of fill-in from Yariv [52], Feyn­man [18], Kit­tel [29], and cit­i­zendium [[2]]. The ex­am­ple on field op­er­a­tors is an ex­er­cise from Sred­nicki [43], whose so­lu­tion was posted on­line by a TA of Joe Polchin­ski from UCSB.

Ac­knowl­edg­ments for spe­cific items are not listed here if a ci­ta­tion is given in the text, or if, as far as I know, the ar­gu­ment is stan­dard the­ory. This is a text book, not a re­search pa­per or his­tor­i­cal note. But if a ref­er­ence is ap­pro­pri­ate some­where, let me know.

Gram­mat­i­cal and spelling er­rors have been pointed out by Ernesto Bosque, Eric Eros, Tag Jong Lee, Alas­tair Mc­Don­ald, Samuel Rus­tan, Dan Schmidt, Mark Van­der­laan, Ra­maswami Sas­try Vedamm, Mikas Ven­gris, Rob Vossen, and Ed Williams. I will try to keep chang­ing there­for” into “there­fore, and send” into “sent, but they do keep sneak­ing in.

Thank you all.