Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World

Topic Science & Mathematics

Subtopic Physics

Quantum Mechanics: The Physics of the Microscopic World

Course Guidebook

Professor Benjamin Schumacher

Kenyon College

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Benjamin Schumacher, Ph.D. Professor of Physics Kenyon College

Benjamin Schumacher is Professor of Physics at Kenyon College, where he has taught for 20 years. He was an undergraduate at Hendrix College and received his Ph.D. in Theoretical Physics from The University of Texas at Austin in 1990, where he was the last doctoral student of John Archibald Wheeler.

Professor Schumacher is the author of numerous scienti?c papers and two books, including Physics in Spacetime: An Introduction to Special Relativity (Rinton Press, 2005). As one of the founders of quantum information theory, Professor Schumacher introduced the term "qubit," invented quantum data compression (also known as "Schumacher compression"), and established several fundamental results about the information capacity of quantum systems. For his contributions, he won the 2002 Quantum Communication Award, the premier international prize in the ?eld, and was named a Fellow of the American Physical Society. Besides quantum information theory, Professor Schumacher has done physics research on black holes, thermodynamics, and statistical mechanics.

Professor Schumacher has spent sabbaticals working at Los Alamos National Laboratory and as a Moore Distinguished Scholar at the Institute for Quantum Information at California Institute of Technology. He has also done research at the Isaac Newton Institute of Cambridge University, the Santa Fe Institute, the Perimeter Institute, the University of New Mexico, the University of Montreal, the University of Innsbruck, and the University of Queensland. At Kenyon College, Professor Schumacher mostly teaches physics, but he also regularly ventures into astronomy, mathematics, scienti?c computing, and the humanities.

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Table of Contents

INTRODUCTION

Professor Biography ............................................................................i Course Scope.....................................................................................1

LECTURE GUIDES

LECTURE 1 The Quantum Enigma ........................................................................4 LECTURE 2 The View from 1900 ...........................................................................7 LECTURE 3 Two Revolutionaries--Planck and Einstein ......................................10 LECTURE 4 Particles of Light, Waves of Matter...................................................13 LECTURE 5 Standing Waves and Stable Atoms ..................................................16 LECTURE 6 Uncertainty .......................................................................................19 LECTURE 7 Complementarity and the Great Debate...........................................22 LECTURE 8 Paradoxes of Interference ................................................................26 LECTURE 9 States, Amplitudes, and Probabilities ...............................................29 LECTURE 10 Particles That Spin ...........................................................................33

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Table of Contents

LECTURE 11 Quantum Twins.................................................................................37 LECTURE 12 The Gregarious Particles..................................................................40 LECTURE 13 Antisymmetric and Antisocial............................................................43 LECTURE 14 The Most Important Minus Sign in the World ...................................45 LECTURE 15 Entanglement ...................................................................................49 LECTURE 16 Bell and Beyond ...............................................................................53 LECTURE 17 All the Myriad Ways..........................................................................56 LECTURE 18 Much Ado about Nothing ..................................................................59 LECTURE 19 Quantum Cloning..............................................................................62 LECTURE 20 Quantum Cryptography ....................................................................66 LECTURE 21 Bits, Qubits, and Ebits ......................................................................68 LECTURE 22 Quantum Computers ........................................................................71 LECTURE 23 Many Worlds or One?.......................................................................74

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