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MENG 31500 — Advanced Quantum Engineering II (Winter Quarter 2026)

Syllabus and Course Outline subject to updates, check course site for any modifications.

Instructor: Prof. Aashish Clerk
Lecture: Tues & Thurs 11:00am–12:20pm, @KPTC 105

Instructor office hours: Thurs 4:30pm–5:30pm (and by appointment)

Course TA: Andy Chu ctchu@uchicago.edu
Discussion Section: Friday 1:30pm–2:50pm, Zoom

PME Tutor Program support: Adi Gandotra (Zoom)
  • Mondays 9:00–11:30am
  • Wednesdays 1:30–4:00pm

Gradings

  1. Problem sets: 20%

    Typically posted Monday and due the following Monday at midnight via Canvas.
    Late assignments are not graded. Collaboration is allowed for discussion, but submitted work must be written up independently in the student’s own words.

  2. Midterm exam: 35%

    • Midterm, Wednesday Feb 4, 5:30pm - 7:30pm @KPTC 105

    Will cover Lecs. 1 - 8. Questions will be directly connected to problem set questions and concepts explicitly discussed in lectures & notes.

  3. Final exam: 45%

    • Final, Tuesday Mar 10, 10:00am - 12:00noon @Stuart 105

    Will cover the entire course; approximately 1/3 of the exam will involve key topics from the first half of the course.
    Will also cover until the 2nd quantization part of the lecture.

Course Materials

  1. Scanned handwritten lecture notes will be provided on Canvas.
  2. Textbooks:
    • Sakurai & Napolitano, Modern Quantum Mechanics (3rd ed., 2020)
    • Shankar, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (2nd ed., 1994)
Topics Covered

  • Entanglement and angular momentum

    • Tensor product spaces; entangled states
    • Clebsch–Gordon coefficients
    • Wigner–Eckart theorem

  • Quantum information preliminaries

    • Bell’s theorem; Hardy paradox
    • Superdense coding

  • Time-independent perturbation theory

    • Non-degenerate and degenerate perturbation theory
    • Applications drawn from atomic physics, quantum optics, and quantum information

  • Time-dependent perturbation theory

    • Interaction picture
    • Fermi’s Golden Rule and applications

  • Many-particle systems

    • Identical particles (bosons and fermions), exchange symmetry/statistics
    • Second quantization