Product Description

This best-selling classic sets the standard for the quantum mechanics physics market. It provides a graduate-level, non-historical, modern introduction of quantum mechanical concepts for first year graduate students. The author was a noted theorist in particle theory, and was well renowned in his area of expertise. This revised edition retains the original material, but adds topics that extend its usefulness into the 21st century. Students will still find such classic developments as neutron interferometer experiments, Feyman path integrals, correlation measurements, and Bell's inequality. Updated material includes time independent perturbation theory for The Degenerate Case which can be found in 5. New supplementary material is at the end of the text.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #101400 in Books
• Published on: 1993-09-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 500 pages

Customer Reviews

one of the few up to date quantum mech textbook
Sakurai is one of the very few q-mech text books that has the recent topics like super conductivity. After the standard books of LAndau and Merzbacher, this book offers a different view to quantum mechanics. The only problem I found with the book is that it is little bit too wordy.

Modern introduction, straight to the point
"What're quantum mechanics?" "Dunno. People who repair quantums, I s'pose." (Terry Pratchett)

You should know a little more about modern physics before reading this book, and have a clear grip on calculus and linear algebra to make the most of it (i. e., be a second- or third-year physics student). Then, Sakurai's book will introduce you to quantum mechanics - modern quantum mechanics, as it is used every day by physicists worldwide.

Most books on QM are historically orientated. They will start out with key experiments and insights, introduce the Heisenberg picture and formalism, and only at the very end (if you are lucky and your professor still has the time), Dirac's formalism will be introduced. Though both formalisms are demonstrably equivalent, Dirac's strikes as being more intuitive and, for many basic problems, easier to apply.

Sakurai's book starts with a key experiment by Stern and Gerlach. It serves as an illustration for the Dirac formalism to which one is introduced later. Bras, kets and operator matrices will soon be very familiar to the reader. Their shaky base (that until now there is no clear idea what actually, precisely constitutes a measurement) is discussed, Heisenberg's and Schrödinger's pictures of QM processes get laid out, and there is enough "bonus material" in the book for a lot of advanced reading. Sakurai assumes that one is already familar with the H atom's structure, so if you've never dealt with it, you should be ready to read it up in a more elementary introduction to modern physics, e. g. Weidner and Sells.

Sakurai puts a lot of emphasis on connecting experimental results and formal procedures, so that one actually understands how and why the formalism works and what the results mean. The book is more sloppy on mathematical rigidness, be prepared to do some proofs and fill gaps in some arguments by yourself.

Unfortunatly, J.J. Sakurai died while writing this book, so San Fu Tuan had to finish it. For most readers, the seems will not we very visible, the book works fine as a whole.

Having studied "Modern QM", you will have a firm fundament to base further pursuits in modern physics on. You will be familar with nowadays' standard formal approaches. If that is what you want, and less a historical overview on how QM developed since the early 1900s, Sakurai is one of the best books you can get.

A book for physicists
The lack of rigour in this book can annoy those who want it, and Sakurai's persistent proclamation of trivial things as "theorems" is risable to any mathematician. The typeset is also quite poor, given the now popular TeX.

However, Sakurai's arrangement of material and insightful explanations often give one more intuition about the subject than the more mathematical approaches. So this is not recommended to those who want to know about rigged Hilbert spaces, but is good for better physical intuition (if any can be gained) about QM.