This post is a set of notes I made on the basic theory of wave-packets and their dynamics, classical and quantum. It’s nearly all well-known stuff, but I made it real for myself by doing a few simple numerical calculations in 1-dimension to illustrate wave-packet spreading and scattering. It’s amusing to see such concepts as partial reflection and transmission, the Wigner delay time and so on emerging from these toy models. I also ventured a preliminary account of how to make such calculations fully realistic using multiple scattering theory in a partial wave formalism.
Wave-Packet Dynamics.pdf
