SUBJECT
Title
Phase transitions
Type of instruction
lecture
Level
master
Faculty
Part of degree program
Credits
3
Recommended in
Semester 3
Typically offered in
Autumn semester
Course description
- Stability of thermodynamic state: coexistences and transitions of different phases, symmetry breaking, classifications. Overview of phase transitions in condensed matter physics. Critical exponents.
- Models of phase transitions. Exact results. Long range order correlations in symmetry breaking states of isotropic systems.
- Classical theories and their critics: Landau theory, mean-field approximation.
- High temperature series.
- Scaling hypothesis and its consequences
- Renormalization group transformation and its connection with critical behaviors: fixed point, scaling, universality.
- Construction of the transformation in real- and in k-space respectively. Overview of the results.
- Dynamical critical phenomena: conventional theory, dynamical critical scaling, examples.
Readings
recommended readings:
- P.M. Chaikin, T.C. Lubensky: Principles of condensed matter physics, Cambridge University Press, 1995.
- J. Cardy: Scaling and Renormalization in Statistical Physics, Cambridge University Press, 1996.