Lecture Notes

Lecture Notes

PHY 521/321:
Condensed Matter Physics I
Prof. S. Teitel stte@pas.rochester.edu ---- Spring 2010

Lecture Notes

My hand written class lecture notes are being scanned and uploaded for you to view. Please be warned that these are the notes I prepare for myself to lecture from - they are not in general carefully prepared for others to read. I make no guarantees about their legibility, or that they are totally free of errors. I hope, nevertheless that you will find them useful. The lectures are uploaded as pdf files, so you will need Adobe Acrobat Reader in order to read them. You can download Acrobat Reader for free here.

The lecture note files correspond roughly to the material presented in a given day's lecture. But you may on occassion find the end of one day's lecture at the start of the file for the next day's lecture, so please look there if you think there might be something missing.

Lecture 1 - What is condensed matter physics? metals, Drude model, dc electric conductivity
Lecture 2 - Hall effect, magnetoresistance, ac electric conductivity, EM wave propagation in metals, plasma frequency
Lecture 3 - Thermal conductivity, Weidemann-Franz law, thermoelectric effect
Lecture 4 - Sommerfeld model, quantum ground state of free electron gas, Fermi surface and Fermi energy, ground state energy, density of states
Lecture 5 - Density of states, pressure, bulk modulus, ideal fermi gas at finite temperature, temperature dependence of the chemical potential
Lecture 6 - Specific heat of electron gas, transport properties within the Sommerfeld model
Lecture 7 - Magnetic properties: Pauli paramagnetism, Landau levels for orbital motion
Lecture 8 - Landau diamagnetism at T=0
Lecture 9 - Landau diamagnetism continued, de Haas - van Alphen effect, screening by the electron gas, Thomas-Fermi dielectric function
Lecture 10 - Thomas-Fermi dielectric function continued, classical Debye-Huckle dielectric function
Lecture 11 - Lindhard dielectric function, Friedel (Ruderman-Kittel) oscillations, Kohn effect, RKKY interaction and the spin glass
Lecture 12 - Plasmons, Wigner crystal
Lecture 13 - Cooper pairs
Lecture 14 - Bravais lattices and crystal structures
Lecture 15 - Reciprocal lattice, Bragg condition for X-ray scattering
Lecture 16 - von Laue condition for X-ray scattering, preview of electrons in ionic potential, geometric and atomic structure factors
Lecture 17 - Electrons in a crystal - qualitative arguments: Bloch's theorem, energy gaps at Bragg planes, Brillouin zones, Born-von Karmen boundary conditions for a Bravais lattice
Lecture 18 - Fourier transforms on a Bravais lattice, Schrodinger's equation for electrons in a periodic potential, Bloch's theorem more rigorously, crystal momentum and band index, reduced, repeated, and extended zone schemes for electronic band structure, average velocity of a Bloch electron state
Lecture 19 - Density of states, van Hove singularities, weak potential approximation for electron eigenstates, velocity near a Bragg plane
Lecture 20 - Band structure in the weak potential approximation, metals and insulators, Bravais lattice with a basis, Brillouin Zones and the Fermi surface

The 2D Brillouin Zones in living color
Lecture 21 - Tight binding approximation for band structure, the s-band
Lecture 22 - Tight binding hybridization of atomic orbitals, band structure of graphene
Lecture 23 - Tight binding band structure of graphene continued, Wanier functions
Lecture 24 - Spin-orbit interaction, some discussion of real metals
Lecture 25 - Semiclassical equations of motion, effective mass, holes, Bloch oscillations
Lecture 26 - Motion in perpendicular electric and magnetic fields, Hall effect and magnetoresistance from closed orbits
Lecture 27 - Effect of open orbits on Hall coefficient and magnetoresistance, normal modes of ion lattice vibration
Lecture 28 - Acoustic and optical phonons, Born-Oppenheimer approximation and the Bohm-Staver relation for the speed of sound