Quantum Mechanics Software

This World Wide Web page written by Dan Styer, Oberlin College Physics Department;
http://www.oberlin.edu/physics/dstyer/TeachQM/Software.html;
last updated 13 January 2000.

I am of course biased, but in my opinion the only software worth consideration for teaching in a junior-senior level quantum mechanics course is:

J.R. Hiller, I.D. Johnston, and D.F. Styer, Quantum Mechanics Simulations
(Wiley, New York, 1995).

This book/software combination contains seven major simulation programs, each accompanied by a text chapter that includes dozens of exercises. The exercises are one of the most valuable features of this book, because they focus student attention on interesting features rather than allowing student investigations to diffuse pointlessly. All this comes at a price about one-third of what you would pay for a single comparable program from other sources.

The programs/chapters are:

One-dimensional bound states
Stationary scattering states in one dimension
Quantum mechanical time development
Electron states in a one-dimensional lattice
Three-dimensional bound states
Identical particles in quantum mechanics
Stationary scattering states in three dimensions
Bound states in cylindrically symmetric potentials

Reviews:

Dale Syphers, Computers in Physics, 10 (1996) 260.
Physics Courseware Communicator, 2(3) (Spring 1995) 12.

The programs "Quantum mechanical time development" and "Identical particles in quantum mechanics" were winners in the 1994 Computers in Physics Educational Software Contest (see Computers in Physics, 8 (1994) 672-678).

This book/software is part of the CUPS project, which has developed similar packages for much of the upper-level physics curriculum.

A descendent of QMTime, the time development program, is the free program QMValue, available through anonymous ftp as the self-extracting archive "QMNow.exe".