Quantum Chemistry

These are some notes that I made for quantum chemistry. It’s still a work in progress, and I hope to finish them before the minor.

Few things to note:

  1. The level of quantum chem here may be a bit higher than the level covered in class. This is ok, as these notes (or some part of them) are also intended for APL100 Quantum Mechanics, which offers a more rigorous treatment of the subject

  2. There may be errors here, as I am no pro at quantum chem. If you do spot an error, feel free to email it to me, or better still, open up a pull request on the git repo after fixing the error.

  3. The notes here are not made from a single reference book and as such, may follow a different order and structure. If you want to go deeper, the reference books I used were:

    1. Introduction to Quantum Mechanics, DJ Griffiths - The classic. Teaches you the most, but also makes you feel extremely stupid.

    2. The Feynman lectures on Physics, Volume 3 - This opens up your mind. Makes for very refined reading, not a book that you’ll study from but rather get inspired to study the subject.

    3. Atkins’ Physical Chemistry - This was the book our course instructor followed

    4. Quantum Physics, HC Verma - Got this very recently. It’s a great book, with a very shallow learning curve. My only gripe is that it’s not very mathematically rigorous for a physics textbook (unlike Griffiths) and the exercises are a cakewalk

I don’t know if you’ll have a good time going through these notes, but my probability distribution function \(\psi^2\) says you will. Happy reading :)