2009/02/10 by Marvin Weinstein, Weinstein, Marvin
Physics and Astronomy · #FOS: Physical sciences #Quantum Physics (quant-ph) #quant-ph
paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.0902.1775
Invited Talk Light Cone 2008. 11 pages, no figures, link to web site where the reference animations can be viewed
arxiv created 2009/02/10 · arxiv updated 2009/12/01
It is apparent to anyone who thinks about it that, to a large degree, the basic concepts of Newtonian physics are quite intuitive, but quantum mechanics is not. My purpose in this talk is to introduce you to a new, much more intuitive way to understand how quantum mechanics works. I refer to this method as a guided numerical approximation scheme and it is based upon a new look at what the path integral tells us about states in Hilbert space. I begin with simple exactly solvable models and show how to handle problems which cannot be dealt with analytically, this includes the treatment of the evolution of a Gaussian wave-packet in an anharmonic potential as well tunneling problems (i.e., instanton effects)