Second year tutorials:

 A3 Quantum Mechanics and Mathematical Methods

  Michaelmas term

This term consists of 6 tutorials covering both Mathematical Methods and A3: Quantum Mechanics.

Teaching material

Books
The main books for this course are:

Several copies of each book are available in the Keble library. The first book will be the basis for your lectures by Prof. Binney, but you are advised to read around from all three. It is reasonable to expect that you should have read a book like Gasiorowicz entirely during the second year (it is a short book after all). The tutorial plan lists those chapters of the book which should be read in preparation for the corresponding tutorial. Reading the book by Shankar is optional for those of you wishing to gain a better understanding of some of the more mathematical aspects of quantum mechanics. With this said I also encourage you to look around for other books which you might prefer, for example the one by Griffiths is very popular. Please discuss with me if you want advice about using another book.

Lecture Notes
You might find some of the older quantum lecture notes useful, as well as Binney's book:

Problem sets
These are the full problem sheets from which I have extracted the questions you attempt each week:

Tutorials

Please hand in all written work promptly by 5pm two days before the tutorials (i.e. the Tuesday) by placing it in the "C" pigeon hole in the Clarendon Laboratory. Any work handed in late will be recorded as such and will potentially be left unmarked. A tutorial session starts at 2pm with a class of approximately 1.5 - 2.0 hours in the room specified below. This is followed by paired tutorials of 30 minutes each in the office DB101 which I share with Dr. Brian Smith. The written work is returned at the beginning of each class and is required for the paired tutorials. There are no paired tutorials in revision class sessions or when only returning vacation work. Below is a guide to the work I expect for each tutorial - please read it carefully since it may differ from previous tutors you have had so far:

Problem sheets
I have constructed an individual problem sheet for each class. These are composed of a subset of questions extracted from the major problem sheets for the maths methods and quantum courses available in the links above. For the quantum mechanics questions you will notice that I use problems from several sources to give you a wide flavour of problem styles. Note that the problems not included in the tutorial work are also important so when revising for collections you should go back and attempt them as well.

Self-assessed and Main questions?
When examining the problem sheet you will notice that they are separated into two parts - self-assessed and main questions. You should read all the questions before starting. Write the answers to each section separately in your script. The self-assessed components is made up of questions for you to practise essential mathematical skills and reproduce important bookwork derivations. Work on this section must be handed in, as evidence that you have attempted them, but will not be marked. Instead I will give you an answer sheet in the tutorial for you to mark your own work afterwards. The main questions are those which should be attempted and handed in. These questions are usually a little harder and will be marked by me.

What are "Essay" questions?
The purpose of essay questions is for you explore your notes and textbooks for material discussing a basic question or issue. You should then formulate a written explanation including relevant mathematical content from what you find. As a guide you should not write more than one handwritten page per question. Moreover to deter you from copying and pasting from Google/Wikipedia I will only accept handwritten answers. To get an idea of what an answer should look like I have made a basic model answer to an essay like question here (see also comments in the pdf).

What is the class "Question"?
The points referred to under Questions are points that will be discussed in class. I will expect you to have researched something about the issues involved beforehand. In particular you should hand in some brief bullet point in your script outlining your ideas and potential contribution to the class discussion. I'm not necessarily looking for correctness here or fully formed answers, just evidence of some thought. Indeed if something puzzles you about the question write it down as well. As a guide here is a basic model answer to a class question (see also comments in the pdf).   

Class project
In the week 4 tutorial I will split the class into two groups of four and assign one seminal research paper in the field of quantum information to each group. Both of these papers are short and herald the discover of a simple but profound concept, namely the “no-cloning theorem” and “quantum teleportation”. By the last tutorial in week 7 we will have covered enough of the basics to have a meaningful discussion about these powerful results and each group will spend about 10 minutes accurately explaining their content to the rest of the class. To help you out I have heavily annotated the pdf files of the papers to give you clues as to what you need to focus on. Also I have written some additional notes here to give you a brief guide to qubits, tensor products and entanglement which will be very useful for understanding these papers.

Tips for your answer script
It is a good idea for you to make a cover sheet for your tutorial work in which you write down unresolved problems or issues you had while tackling the any part of the work we have done so far. I will attempt to help answer these in our tutorial. 

 

Mathematical methods and A3: Quantum mechanics

Please contact Dr. Stephen Clark if you have questions about the tutorials.

Finally here is a motivational link for when you're feeling frustrated with QM!

© 2011 Stephen Clark. Last modification: October 31st, 2011