Group Theory has become an invaluable tool in the physics community. Despite numerous introductory books, the subject remains challenging for beginners. Mathematica has emerged as a popular tool for research and education, offering various packages and built-in tools for Group Theory. However, these resources are often too scattered for effective educational use. This work aims to provide a comprehensive source to help beginning students grasp Group Theory concepts and their applications from a physicist's perspective, while also building familiarity with symbolic language. We present several example notebooks that succinctly cover well-known theories and demonstrate specific concepts, which can be easily adapted for educational purposes. We provide basic examples on finite, compact and non-compact groups, and motivate the use of these concepts in solving physics problems such as addition of angular momenta, modelling a system of qubits and the description of spacetime transformations.
arXiv link: https://arxiv.org/abs/arXiv:2408.01441 [physics.ed-ph]
- This repository contains the Mathematica notebooks listed in the book in the chapter "List of Notebooks".
- These contain the codes for generating the results in different parts of the book, whose snippets have been used in the text.
- Besides, the repository also contains some working examples in various topics such as root diagrams and Clebsch-Gordan coefficients.
- One needs to use specific Mathematica packages in order to run some of the notebooks, for example:
- To run the file
SU4_Baryons.nbone would need to install the package SimpleGroups.m, which is available at https://avladimirov.net/images/ExtraMaterials/SimpleGroups/SimpleGroupsver098b.m
- To run the file
- The readers are advised to solve the exercises given in the text using (modified versions of) these notebooks.
For queries, comments, or suggestions regarding the repository, please contact souradeepdas@iisc.ac.in