SUBJECT

Title

Phase transitions

Type of instruction

lecture

Level

master

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.