Sunday, August 8, 2010

Excellent text on chemical physics

I just bought a copy of Quantum mechanics in chemistry by George Schatz and Mark Ratner (the Dover edition is only US$17 at Amazon).
I wish I had bought a copy years ago. I knew of the books existence but assumed it was just another introductory book on quantum chemistry. However, the book is very different. There is significant focus on dynamics, condensed phase effects, and density matrices. Second quantisation is used extensively [something many theoretical chemists are not comfortable with but physicists are]. Much of the material is things the last few years I have struggled to learn myself or find where it is clearly written down. It has nice problems and chemical applications.

1 comment:

  1. This was the textbook that I used for post-graduate physical chemistry at Illinois. I still have my copy - maybe I should have loaned it to you earlier...

    Sometime after coming to Australia, I realized that Jeff's name appears a lot in the chapter on correlation functions.

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