Condensed Matter Physic

1. Introductory overview. Phases of matter.  Crystalline solids, amorphous materials (glasses), liquid crystals, colloids and liquids.  Material properties. Electrical and thermal conductivity, dielectric response, magnetism, thermal expansion.

2. The Sommerfeld theory of metals:  Justification for the free electron model. Bloch theorem. Fermi-dirac distribution. The Fermi surface for free electrons. Density of states.  The specific heat.

3. The Sommerfeld theory of electrical and thermal conduction: the relaxation time approximation for free electrons.  The Wiedemann-Franz Law.

4. Correlations among free electrons.  (Beyond the independent electron approximation). The Hartree-Fock approximation.

5. Electrons in periodic potentials (Beyond the free electron approximation).  Band structure (in the independent electron approximation). General properties. Effective masses. Band calculations for weak and strong periodic potentials.  The tight binding method.

6. Transport properties: Metals, semiconductors and insulators.

7. The Fermi surface of real metals. Landau levels. The de Haas van Alphen effect. Lower dimensional systems: The Quantum Hall effect.

8. Semiconductors.  Holes and electrons. Generation, recombination, transport.

Books:
Ashcroft and Mermin, Solid State Physics (Saunders College, Philadelphia, 1976).
Hook and Hall, Solid State Physics (John Wiley & Sons, N.Y., 1991)
Marder, Condensed Matter Physics (John Wiley, N.Y., 2000)
Turton, The physics of solids (Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000)
Kittel, Introduction to Solid State Physics (any recent edition).


Source: http://atlas.cc.itu.edu.tr/~erzan/CMT1-02.doc