I didn't really care for Liboff. It has maybe a bit more material than Shankar, but not as much physical motivation. Shankar is also much more self-contained and conducive to self-study.
You should really ask the instructor for a syllabus. A typical undergrad one semester intro to solid state should be completely understandable with only a rudimentary knowledge of QM. If the instructor expects you to have taken a QM course already though, chances are they're going to draw on it.
If either of them does an introduction to statistical mechanics, take that one. If not, I'd say that the chemistry one will probably be closer to a physicists take on thermo.
And I used Hand & Finch (and recommend it as much as I can recommend any classical mechanics book, although it sort of presupposes you know enough Newtonian mechanics.)
Shankar is a great book. It is certainly sufficient to develop an operational understanding of quantum mechanics, and if you understand the material in it you'll be plenty ready to apply QM. Sakurai is a bit deeper, but also less verbose and a bit more formal. It's a good book to read, but if...
My point is simply that publication isn't nearly as important as doing quality undergraduate research even from the utility of getting into a good graduate school. If a student is published in a field where they don't intend to actually do graduate work, the admissions committee will certainly...
In any case, even in the most shrewd, cynical sense - the letter of recommendation is much more important than the publication. What kind of letter will you end up with for an outstanding amount of unpublishable effort versus half-assedly running some computer simulations?
I think that doing research that you aren't really interested in is exceedingly obvious - both from the fact that it will not prepare you for grad school (unless you plan to write your dissertation on things that don't interest you)... And just imagine your personal statement: "I've worked for a...
I had the same experience doing an undergraduate research project, where a too-good-to-be-true result turned out, as I was starting to finish everything up, to be untrue. C'est la vie.
Did you learn something from the experience?
Quantum liquids are studied by condensed matter folks, so you're largely right about the mathematical framework (including path integrals), but there's also a lot of other techniques at play, which go under the heading of "many body physics." I personally like the book by Fetter and Walecka.
What kind of theoretical physicist do you want to be?
I don't think that anyone who studies physics can get away without being well versed in everything up to and including group theory in the list posted by EnSvensk. Beyond that, though, the rest of that stuff is useful if you want to do high...