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Phase transitions
Many physical systems exhibit phase transitions, i.e. abrupt changes in their properties when a parameter crosses a threshold value: a fluid changes from a liquid to a gaseous state at the evaporation temperature, a magnet loses its magnetic properties at the Curie temperature, and so on.
Syllabus
Despite the diversity of these systems, there is a striking universality among these phase transitions, including the equality of critical exponents, which describe the behavior of the system in the vicinity of the transition, for a whole class of a priori unrelated problems.
This course will present the statistical physics approach to phase transitions, describing general results on their existence, the mean field treatment, and an elementary introduction to statistical field theory and the renormalization group ideas that help explain the universality.
Evaluation
Written exam
Prerequisite
Introduction to statistical mechanics course