Albert Messiah - Quantum Mechanics

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ULTRASONIC ABSORPTION: AN INTRODUCTION TO THE THEORY OF SOUND ABSORPTION AND DISPERSION IN GASES, LIQUIDS AND SOLIDS, A. B. Bhatia. (0-486-64917-2)

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ATOMIC PHYSICS: 8TH EDITION, Max Born. (0-486-65984-4)

MATHEMATICS OF CLASSICAL AND QUANTUM PHYSICS, Frederick W. Byron, Jr., and Robert W. Fuller. (0-486-67164-X)

RADIATIVE TRANSFER, Subrahmanyan Chandrasekhar. (0-486-60590-6)

MATHEMATICAL METHODS FOR PHYSICISTS AND ENGINEERS: SECOND CORRECTED EDITION, Royal Eugene Collins. (0-486-40229-0)

LECTURES ON QUANTUM MECHANICS, Paul A. M. Dirac. (0-486-41713-1)

THE PRINCIPLE OF RELATIVITY, Albert Einstein and Francis A. Davis. (0-486-60081-5)

PHYSICS OF WAVES, William C. Elmore and Mark A. Heald. (0-486-64926-1)

THERMODYNAMICS, Enrico Fermi. (0-486-60361-X)

THEORETICAL MECHANICS OF PARTICLES AND CONTINUA, Alexander L. Fetter and John Dirk Walecka. (0-486-43261-0)

QUANTUM THEORY OF MANY-PARTICLE SYSTEMS, Alexander L. Fetter and John Dirk Walecka. (0-486-42827-3)

QUANTUM MECHANICS AND PATH INTEGRALS: EMENDED EDITION, Richard P. Feynman and Albert R. Hibbs. Emended by Daniel F. Styer. (0-486-47722-3)

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WEAK INTERACTIONS AND MODERN PARTICLE THEORY, Howard Georgi. (0-486-46904-2)

COLLISION THEORY, Marvin L. Goldberger and Kenneth M. Watson. (0-486-43507-5)

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MECHANICS, J. P. Den Hartog. (0-486-60754-2)

AN INTRODUCTION TO STATISTICAL THERMODYNAMICS, Terrell L. Hill. (0-486-65242-4)

THE FUNCTIONS OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, Harry Hochstadt. (0-486-65214-9)

QUANTUM FIELD THEORY, Claude Itzykson and Jean-Bernard Zuber. (0-486-44568-2)

OPTICS AND OPTICAL INSTRUMENTS: AN INTRODUCTION, B. K. Johnson. (0-486-60642-2)

THEORETICAL PHYSICS, Georg Joos and Ira M. Freeman. (0-486-65227-0)

QUANTUM MECHANICS IN SIMPLE MATRIX FORM, Thomas F. Jordan. (0-486-44530-5)

PROBLEMS IN QUANTUM MECHANICS, V. I. Kogan and V. M. Galitskiy. (0-486-48088-7)

FUNDAMENTALS OF MATHEMATICAL PHYSICS, Edgar A. Kraut. (0-486-45809-1)

THE VARIATIONAL PRINCIPLES OF MECHANICS, Cornelius Lanczos. (0-486-65067-7)

SYMMETRY PRINCIPLES IN SOLID STATE AND MOLECULAR PHYSICS, Melvin Lax. (0-486-42001-9)

GEOMETRY AND LIGHT: THE SCIENCE OF INVISIBILITY, Ulf Leonhardt and Thomas Philbin. (0-486-47693-6)

THE MANY-BODY PROBLEM IN QUANTUM MECHANICS, N. H. March, W. H. Young, and S. Sampanthar. (0-486-68754-6)

AN ELEMENTARY TREATISE ON ELECTRICITY: SECOND EDITION, James Clerk Maxwell. (0-486-43884-8)

TREATISE ON ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM 2 VOLUME SET, James Clerk Maxwell. (0-486-46119- X)

THEORY OF HEAT, James Clerk Maxwell. (0-486-41735-2)

MATHEMATICAL TOOLS FOR PHYSICS, James Nearing. (0-486-48212- X)

INTRODUCTION TO ELECTROMAGNETIC THEORY, George E. Owen. (0-486-42830-3)

THE COSMIC CODE: QUANTUM PHYSICS AS THE LANGUAGE OF NATURE, Heinz R. Pagels. (0-486-48506-4)

CLASSICAL ELECTRICITY AND MAGNETISM: SECOND EDITION, Wolfgang K. H. Panofsky and Melba Phillips. (0-486-43924-0)

THE THEORY OF RELATIVITY, R. K. Pathria. (0-486-42819-2)

EIGHT LECTURES ON THEORETICAL PHYSICS, Max Planck. (0-486-69730-4)

QUANTUM MECHANICS IN HILBERT SPACE: SECOND EDITION, Eduard Prugovecki. (0-486-45327-8)

ELEMENTARY QUANTUM MECHANICS, David S. Saxon. New Introduction by Joseph A. Rudnick and Robert Finkelstein. (0-486-48596- X)

AN INTRODUCTION TO RELATIVISTIC QUANTUM FIELD THEORY, Silvan S. Schweber. (0-486-44228-4)

INTRODUCTION TO SUPERCONDUCTIVITY: SECOND EDITION, Michael Tinkham. (0-486-43503-2)

INTRODUCTION TO THE PHYSICS OF FLUIDS AND SOLIDS, James S. Trefil. (0-486-47437-2)

INTRODUCTION TO LIGHT: THE PHYSICS OF LIGHT, VISION, AND COLOR, Gary Waldman. (0-486-42118- X)

SPACE, TIME, MATTER, Hermann Weyl. (0-486-60267-2)

RANDOM VIBRATIONS: THEORY AND PRACTICE, Paul H. Wirsching, Thomas L. Paez and Keith Ortiz. (0-486-45015-5)

QUANTUM THEORY OF SCATTERING, Ta-you Wu and Takashi Ohmura. (0-486-48089-5)

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TWO VOLUMES BOUND AS ONE

Albert Messiah

DOVER PUBLICATIONS, INC.

Mineola, New York

Copyright

Copyright Dunod, Paris, 1995, 2nd edition.

All rights reserved.

Bibliographical Note

This Dover edition, first published in 2014, is an unabridged and unaltered republication in one volume of the English translation of Mcanique Quantique, first published in 1961-62. Volume I was translated from the French by G. H. Temmer, Volume II by J. Potter. The combined Index for both volumes has been placed at the end of this edition.

International Standard Book Number

ISBN-13: 978-0-486-78455-7

ISBN-10: 0-486-78455-X

Manufactured in the United States by Courier Corporation

78455X01 2014

www.doverpublications.com

Nowadays, there hardly exists a branch of physics which one can seriously approach without a thorough knowledge of Quantum Mechanics. Its presentation, which is given in this work is, I hope, simple enough to be accessible to the student, and yet sufficiently complete to serve as a reference book for the working physicist.

This book resulted from a course given at the Center of Nuclear Studies at Saclay since 1953. Numerous discussions with students as well as with my colleagues, have helped me considerably in clarifying its presentation. Several people to whom I had transmitted certain parts of the manuscript, have kindly given me their criticism; among them I should like to mention Messrs. Edmond Bauer and Jean Ullmo, to whom I am indebted for interesting remarks concerning the presentation of principles. I am more particularly grateful to Mr. Roger Balian for having critically examined a large portion of the manuscript, and for having suggested to me a large number of improvements. Finally, I wish to thank those of my students who were kind enough to check over the text and the calculations of the various chapters, and to help me with the correction of the proofs.

The problems which occur at the end of each chapter were chosen not only for their educational value, but also to point out certain properties worthy of interest; this may explain the relative difficulty of certain ones among them.

The several works or articles cited as references have the purpose of aiding the reader to complete or round out certain passages. It was out of the question to give a complete bibliography of the various subjects treated here. An entire volume would not have sufficed for that.

OF VOLUME I

(A) MATHEMATICAL FRAMEWORK

(B) DESCRIPTION OF PHYSICAL PHENOMENA

OF VOLUME II

METHODS OF APPROXIMATION

Fluctuat nec mergitur

... Il lui proposa de faire le
voyage de Copenhague, et lui en
facilita les moyens (Candide)