Solving Common Introductory Quantum Mechanics Problems using Sympy

This Jupyter notebook show basic examples for quantum calculations encountered in undergraduate physical chemistry course. The purpose of this notebook is not to explain the theory behind the calculations, bur rather show how python can be used for solving typical problems.

This notebook assumes sympy is available and some familiarity with python lists and functions. The sympy tutorial describes all of the functions used in the notebook.

Learning Objectives

After completing this work you should be able to use python and sympy to

• calculate a normalization constant
• calculate an expectation value and its variance
• determine whether a function is an eigenvalue of an operator
• determine if functions are orthogonal

Prerequisites

• basic understanding of eigenfuctions, normalization, orthogonality, and expectation values
• basic knowledge of python and sympy
• a python environment with Sympy symbolic math library

Author

Steve Singleton, Coe College ssinglet@coe.edu

Adapted from work of E. Harvey, JCE Symmath project.

Location

Jupyter notebook preview

Download ipynb file (click Save As)

License

Original work copyright Journal of Chemical Education

Derivative work is CC-BY-SA Creative Commons ShareAlike.