Semester: Spring

Offered: 2018

As a first course in quantum mechanics, tailored for engineering, applied mathematics and computer science students, this course will teach concepts needed to engineer a quantum world, to understand quantum mechanical properties of materials and build an intuition for quantum information science. The course will be a hybrid of lectures on theory, state-of-the-art computational methods (‘theory-lab’) in quantum simulations and we will use IBM Q Experience, an open access quantum computer. Topics will include periodic potentials and the tight-binding approach, quantizing vibrations in solids, spin matrices and an introduction to qubits. Assignments will teach the basics of the Python programming language, introduce students to open source scientific software and electronic structure methods.