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
- Lectures: 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 session: Friday 1:30pm–2:50pm, Zoom
- PME Tutor Program support: Adi Gandotra (Zoom)
- Mondays 9:00–11:30am
- Wednesdays 1:30–4:00pm
Grading Structure¶
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Problem sets: 20%
- Approximately weekly
- 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
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Midterm exam: 35%
- Wed. Feb. 4, 5:30pm - 7:30pm KPTC 105
- Will cover Lecs. 1 - 8
- You will be provided a basic formula sheet (will post this by early next week)
- Questions will be directly connected to problem set questions and concepts explicitly discussed in lectures & notes.
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Final exam: 45%
- Three-hour exam during the regular final exam period
- Cumulative over the entire course
Course Materials¶
- Scanned handwritten lecture notes will be provided on Canvas.
- Textbooks:
- Sakurai & Napolitano, Modern Quantum Mechanics (3rd ed., 2020)
- Shankar, Principles of Quantum Mechanics (2nd ed., 1994)
Topics¶
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Entanglement and angular momentum
- Tensor product spaces; entangled states
- Clebsch–Gordon coefficients
- Wigner–Eckart theorem
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Quantum information preliminaries
- Bell’s theorem; Hardy paradox
- Superdense coding
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Time-independent perturbation theory
- Non-degenerate and degenerate perturbation theory
- Applications drawn from atomic physics, quantum optics, and quantum information
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Time-dependent perturbation theory
- Interaction picture
- Fermi’s Golden Rule and applications
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Many-particle systems
- Identical particles (bosons and fermions), exchange symmetry/statistics
- Second quantization