This book has grown out of a course given at the University of Nice over many years for advanced undergraduates and graduate students in physics. The first ten chapters correspond to a basic course in quantum mechanics for advanced undergraduates, and the last four could serve to complement a graduate course in, for example, atomic physics. The book contains about 130 exercises of varying length and difficulty, most of which have actually been used in homework or exams.

This book should be interesting not only to students in physics and engineering, but also to a wider group of physicists: graduate students, researchers, and secondary school teachers who wish to update their knowledge of quantum physics. It discusses recent developments not covered in the classic texts such as entangled states, quantum cryptography and quantum computing, decoherence, interactions of a laser with a two level atom, quantum fluctuations of the electromagnetic field, laser manipulation of atoms, and so on, and it also includes a concise discussion of the current ideas about measurement in quantum mechanics as an appendix.

The organization of this book differs greatly from that of the classic texts, which typically begin with the Schrödinger equation and then proceed to study its solution in various situations. That approach makes it necessary to introduce the basic principles of quantum mechanics in a relatively complicated situation, and they end up being obscured by calculations which are often rather complex. Instead, I have striven to present the fundamentals of quantum mechanics using the simplest examples, and the Schrödinger equation appears only in Chapter 9.