Molecular Quantum Mechanics

My impression is that most of QM books for physicists are overfocusing on mathematical formalism of QM without much connection to real atomic systems.The Atkins' book is differnet and would be a very good supplement for a formal QM course book, like Griffiths or Sakurai.The range of topics spans from standard discussions of hydrogen and multielectron atoms to group theory, molecules and description of spectroscopic effects. It also contains fairly good overview of the modern molecular structure computational methods.Most of the topics are well elaborated (semiclassical approximation is sketchy though) with mathematics kept to a bare minimum with many examples (good for self-study).The end of chapter problems and exercises are well selected to develop an intuition, that matters a lot if you plan on doing research in the future.Overall, it is a very good reading to prepare yourself for courses in solid state physics, material science and related fields.

I used this text after struggling for the first few weeks in my quantum chemistry course at Berkeley. Recommended by my professor, this text made sense of things that I believed impossible. And, it includes a lot of graphs to boot! I found this book coupled with Griffith's Quantum Mechanics to have been the best possible undergrad combo in my junior year as a chemistry undergrad. In fact, I sold my required text and passed the class with flying colors using just the Atkins book and the Griffith text. Where Atkins is too wordy, Griffith's concise explanations help greatly. And, vice versa, when you need more info, turn to Atkins. Bon chance!

It is a wonderful textbook for beginners. Concepts for quantum mechanics is hard to understand. Don't be upset. You don't need to be professional in quantum mechanics, you just need to use it. You can read over and over again when you begin to run dft calculations. After that, all equation would be understandable.

I have been reading reviews in this forum about this book. A few reviewers compare this book with two other popular quantum chemistry textbooks, namely, McQuarrie’s “Quantum Chemistry” and Levine’s “Quantum Chemistry. I do not think it is an apple-to-apple comparison. First McQuarrie’s book is only an entry-level book. All the mathematical derivations are clearly laid out. There are hardly any doubts that McQuarrie's exposition of the subject is much better. For students that are mathematically less inclined and want to learn quantum chemistry, McQuarrie’s book is the best among the three. However, only topics that are considered as traditional training for a chemist are covered in McQuarrie's book. After all the preliminaries such as particle in a box, operators, simple harmonic oscillator, angular momenta and perturbation theory, the book focuses on electronic theories of atoms and molecules. Both McQuarrie's and Atkins' books use the method of creation and annihilation operators to solve the Schrodinger Equation for a simple harmonic oscillation. Levine's book still uses the traditional power series method. Mathematically, the operator method is definitely much more elegant. Levine’s book is very similar to McQuarrie’s book; mathematically it is on a much higher level. Both books hardly touch on group theory.Mathematically, Atkins’ book is more compact and advanced than McQuarrie’s book. Unlike McQuarrie’s book, the mathematical derivations are not laid out in a step-by-step fashion. In principle, a person who has well working knowledge of calculus should have no problems with the mathematics. All other necessary mathematics are presented at the end of each chapter. To better understand this book, it is important to follow the mathematics with a pencil and a piece of paper. Mathematical techniques such as gradient, Laplacian, curl and divergence of a vector field, matrices, complex numbers, Dirac delta function, ordinary and partial differential equations are frequently used.Atkins’ book covers a wide range of topics in quantum mechanics. These include group theory, optical activity, electric properties of molecules, magnetic properties of molecules and scattering theory. These topics are generally not covered in a few quantum chemistry texts. Although it has a chapter on computational chemistry, its coverage is less extensive than that of Levine’s. Levine's book devotes 4 chapters on molecular modeling (one chapter is on electron correlation). The chapter on group theory is fairly extensive and it includes proofs of the Great and Little Orthogonality Theorems, the constructions of character tables, projection operators and rotational groups. This chapter provides all the most common techniques that are used in chemistry. The last two chapters are probably the most sophisticated ones. It introduces concepts such as vector potential, gauge transformation and invariance, central potential. scattering amplitude and scattering phase shift. Of all the quantum chemistry and NMR books that I have read, this is the only book I come across that shows the full derivation of the Lamb formula, the diamagnetic contribution to shielding in NMR spectroscopy. Although integral equation and Green’s function are used in the last chapter on scattering theory, a person with a good background of calculus should not have any difficulties in understanding mathematics in the Born approximation.If you are interested in the mathematics of quantum physics, this is a book for you. Since it is a book on molecular quantum mechanics, it does not cover topics such as spin, identical particles, density matrices, quantum computing (e.g. quantum encryption) and foundations of quantum mechanics (e.g. hidden variables and Bell Inequality). All these topics can be found in David Miller’s book, “Introduction to Quantum Mechanics to Scientists and Engineers”. Mathematically, Miller’s book is on the same level, may be slightly lower, as that of Atkins’ book. These two books do not presume knowledge of advanced classical mechanics such as Hamiltonian and Lagrangians. Miller's book makes a fine compliment to Atkins' book.If you have mastered McQuarrie’s and Levine’s books, I think you should have a copy this book. The mathematics and quantum mechanics in Atkins’ book are really interesting. It is worth spending the time to understand the mathematics.

Being four chapters into this textbook now, and with a decent background in mathematics, I feel very strongly that this book has set a bar for explanation of difficult phenomena. At no point does the ideas presented seem unreachable, and the build from topic to topic is masterful. Sincerely, I am glad to be using this text for this subject.

I have always thought that Atkins' textbooks were horrible. His worst book was Physical Chemistry, only the 2nd edition was good, then it deteriorated considerably (now I think it's up to the 8th edition! very hard to read that book). This one, Molecular Quantum Mechanics, has an excellent selection of topics, and is mostly a book that will teach you about spectroscopy techniques for the study of molecules (NMR, ESR, vibrational spectroscopy, rotational spectroscopy, etc). It does a fairly good job at teaching things with minimal assumed background. So anyone with basic calculus and some intro to QM should be able to read this book. Atkins derives much of the QM tools needed for the rest of the book (e.g. time-dependent perturbation theory). His presentation of the more "mathematical" topics is generally very lucid. With the exception of the section on group theory, which I've always thought was incomprehensible. You will find a MUCH better (and friendly) learning tool in D.C. Harris' (dover) book. Group theory is taught without any nonsense. I also like Bernath's textbook for group theory (that's about the only thing that's good in Bernath). Anyhow, Atkins IS a good buy. You will learn a lot from it, and it can serve as an excellent supplement to any course on quantum mechanics. He is very pedagogical, and the book includes tons of relevant worked examples. Many of them are non-trivial too, so it makes you feel good, that you've learned new stuff and improved your skills. I would say this is a good book, from an author who usually writes mediocre textbooks.