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Phase transitions
Phase transitions take place in many different branches of physics: from soft and hard condensed matter to cosmology and high-energy physics. This course presents the fundamental ideas, concepts and methods that underpin the modern theory of phase transitions.
Syllabus
Despite the diversity of these systems, there is a striking universality among these phase transitions, including the equality of critical exponents, which describe the behavior of the system in the vicinity of the transition, for a whole class of a priori unrelated problems.
This course will present the statistical physics approach to phase transitions, describing general results on their existence, the mean field treatment, and an elementary introduction to statistical field theory and the renormalization group ideas that help explain the universality.
Evaluation
Written exam
Prerequisite
Introduction to statistical mechanics course