Italian and/or English upon request by the students.
Course Content
Symmetry, order and phase transitions. Correlations in classical systems; order parameter and models. Mean-field theory. First and second order phase transitions. GL theory of the superconductivity. Critical exponents, universality and scaling laws. Renormalization group and critical phenomena. Ferromagnets and antiferromagnets; spin-wave excitations.
P.M. Chaikin, T.C. Lubensky,
"Principles of condensed matter physics"
J.M. Yeomans,
"Statistical Mechanics of Phase Transitions"
Learning Objectives
The course aims at indroducing the essential concepts and physical quantities employed to describe and investigate structural properties of liquids and solids, as well as their elementary excitations. Critical phenomena will be also addressed, together with magnetic properties of systems of different dimensionalities. The richness of the phenomenology and the extent of applications in different fields of Physics, makes the course suitanle both for students aiming at specializing in theory and in experimental physics of matter.
Prerequisites
Base courses on General Physics, Quantum Mechanics, Physics of Matter, Thermodynamics, Statistical Mechanics.
Teaching Methods
Lectures on the blackboard.
Further information
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Type of Assessment
Exam modality: oral examination in front of a blackboard; the exam will last 45 minutes, on average. The student will be asked to discuss 2-3 specific topics listed in the program, in such a way to cover all the parts treated by the different lecturers. The student will be required to prove her/his knowledge of the different physical phenomena treated in the course, and should also be able to describe the reasoning underlying the different models discussed in the lectures, and to reproduce proofs and calculations; she/he will be also required to estimate the order of magnitude of the different relevant physical quantities and to discuss the physical motivation of possible approximations employed in the calculations. The final marks will result according to the proven mastery of the discussed subjects, the ability to use a proper language and of singling out the relationships among the different topics dealt with in the lectures and between them and the previous knowledge acquired in the basic courses.