Angular Momentum: Understanding Spatial Aspects in Chemistry and Physics

by Richard N. Zare

Designed as a learning tool for those with limited background in quantum mechanics, this book provides comprehensive coverage of angular momentum in quantum mechanics and its applications to chemistry and physics. Based on class-tested material, this presentation offers clear explanations of theory while giving equal attention to solving real problems. Theoretical considerations are made concrete and accessible through extensive examples and applications...

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0471858927
• ISBN13: 9780471858928
• Release Date: January 1991
• Publisher: Wiley-Interscience
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 1.65 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.4" x 9.6"

Customer Reviews

Angular Momentum Tour de Force

"Angular Momentum: Understanding Spatial Aspects in Chemistry & Physics" by Richard N. Zare is an absolutely essential text to compliment advanced courses (and related texts) in quantum mechanics, quantum chemistry, and spectroscopy, and a vital reference for anyone involved in atomic & molecular physics. As another Reviewer has pointed out earlier, the title provides something of an object lesson about judging a book by the cover: the material and coverage is much broader than the title would imply and does more to provide a unifying theme for what might otherwise be titled "A Child's Garden of Interesting Atomic and Molecular Phenomenon". In terms of orientation (no pun intended) and focus, "Angular Momentum" is strongly pedagogical and Zare correctly describes it in the Preface as "...a learning text for those with a minimum background in quantum mechanics". With that in mind, the material is quite accessible to anyone with the underpinnings of quantum chemistry from an undergraduate physical chemistry course or similar background from a physics department. Operationally, each Chapter is devoted to a specific, well-contained subject, and supplemented by a comprehensive set of notes and references, a strong and enjoyable set of Problems, and appendices of "Applications" which serve as very solid guides to deploying the 'machinery' in the context of a very real problems. (For example, following Chapter 1 on Angular Momentum Operators and Wavefunctions, a very self-contained treatment of scattering theory is presented in Application 1.) Organizationally, the Chapters build up to important results in coherent and graspable fashion. One of the absolutely delightful aspects of Zare's presentation is that all of the important results are crafted in a manner which is well-motivated. This is most obvious in the treatment of the Wigner-Eckart Theorem: an exquisite result but most often a diabolical one. Zare's development leading up to Wigner-Eckart is transparent, beautiful, and thorough, and his appears to be the only treatment clearly elucidates what is, rightfully, "...the power and glory of the celebrated Wigner-Eckart theorem". This clear exposure of the 'disentanglement' of geometry, symmetry, and dynamical phenomenon is seemingly absent in other texts and really is the whole POINT. And by the time Wigner-Eckart is presented, the reader is well armed with the necessary Clebsch-Gordon and 3-j symbol formalism to immediately put it to decisive use. Interestingly, Zare places a seemingly conventional topic -- energy-level structure and wavefunctions of a rigid rotor -- in the final Chapter (6). Chemists will be more familiar with this subject as a proving ground or scaffold to build up results. While that is true here as well, it also includes a presentation of the concept of Rotational Energy Surfaces, Van-Vleck Transformation, and last (but not least), some selection rules. An Appendix includes Fortran77 code for generation o

This is a must-have for p-chem. graduate students !

I have read this book with a great joy. The author of this book is a leading authority in the field of reaction dynamics, and has played a key role in applyingp the vector correlation in physical chemistry problems. The best part of this book probably is the example/problem set part where the reader is asked to use the knowledge obtained from the chapter to solve the "real" problem (mostly on spectroscopy and the gas phase reaction dynamics). I highly recommend this book.

Angular momentum for dummies...

There are, of course, several other books that derive and explain the details and myriad equations involved in our understanding of angular momentum (e.g. Edmonds, Judd). However, none of them explain the mathematics and physical results in "simple English" as well as Zare's. The problem sets and applications are particularly helpful and relevant to a wide variety of common experimental techniques and data analyses. I also strongly recommend purchasing the companion solutions manual. The only derogatory comment that I can make is that there are much better programs available for calculating the 3, 6, and 9J symbols than those found in the appendix. I doubt this comes as a surprise to anyone.

A well-written book focussed on experimental applications

This is a well-written and very interesting book with (perhaps) an unfortunate title. My first reaction was "A book devoted to angular momentum? Who would read such a thing?"Ignore the title and look at the sub-title: "Understanding Spatial Aspects in Chemistry and Physics." This book covers everything from polarized fluorescence spectroscopy to molecular beam scattering to molecular reorientation in liquids. All of these topics have one thing in common -- they are spatially anisotropic, and Zare leads the reader through a tutorial on their analysis.There are other books on this topic. (The monographs by Rose and by Brink and Satchler come to mind.) To my taste, they are dry and boring.Zare's book is different. Although he presents the material with the same rigor, he also includes 16 "applications" (i.e. problem sets) that showcase some of the most elegant physical chemistry/chemical physics problems of the century. For example, their are applications dealing with scattering, polarized fluorescence, Zeeman quantum beats, correlation functions in spectroscopy, and the spectroscopy of diatomic molecules. These applications usually cover real molecular problems -- not watered down analogues. Zare's discussion of spherical tensor operators deserves special note for its clarity.This book should be approachable to anyone with at least one semester of graduate quantum chemistry or physics under their belt.

A masterful account on the theory of angular momentum.

The theory of angular momentum is important in many fields of chemistry and physics.This book is a magnificently sadistic way to waste time and go crazy. I recommended to every introspective scientist that has no personal life and enjoys wasting time with the arcane.