The work on exercise solutions continues to progress with difficulty. Currently, this is version 0.5. Compared to version 0.4, chapters 8 and 9 have been skipped, and the exercises for the statistical mechanics sections in chapters 10 and 11 have been completed first.
Chapter 10 contains 10 exercises, while Chapter 11 actually has no exercises. Although it seems like a small number, the difficulty of each exercise is quite high. The main content of these two chapters involves using the path integral method to calculate partition functions in statistical mechanics, which is inherently a very arduous task. Coupled with Feynman’s intuitive descriptions in the book, it is easy for readers to grasp the general idea but very difficult to carry out the actual calculations. In fact, for the exercises in this chapter, I have consulted a considerable amount of material, both in Chinese and English, to barely complete them.
Although I say “completed,” I have only finished 9 out of the 10 problems. Among them, Problem 10-3 is confusing; the result I obtained feels different from the one given by Feynman, so I could not proceed further. I am raising this here in the hope that knowledgeable readers can offer some guidance.
Additionally, regarding the variational method in Chapter 11, although there are no exercises, the main calculations (such as calculating first-order path integrals) are actually included in the explanations and exercises of Chapter 10. Therefore, one must thoroughly understand Chapter 10 to properly study Chapter 11. Incidentally, the author believes that my article “The Extremum Principle of Lower Bound Estimation — A Primary Version of the Variational Principle” is very helpful for beginners learning the variational principle.
Download: Solutions to Exercises in “Quantum Mechanics and Path Integrals” V0.5.pdf
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