Phase Transitions (M2)
Past exam sheets (but see below for the current form of the exam!):
As described in the syllabus, the final exam for this class consists in a written essay (plus an optional oral presentation). Please find below some useful material for the essay:
1) LaTex template for the essay: here
2) All essays of the past years - 2015/2016 and 2016/2017 - (and the viewgraphs of some presentations) can be found at this webpage.
2017-2018 EDITION: paper whiteboard and videos
1+2) 10/11/2017: paperboard scans + viewgraphs; videos: part1 part2
paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
3) 13/11/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
4) 17/11/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
pre-recorded material for lecture no. 5
a) Dimensional analysis, Ginzburg criterion and perturbation expansion video scan
b) Dimensional analysis and anomalous dimension video scan
5) 20/11/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
6) 24/11/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
7) 1/12/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
8) 4/12/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
9) 8/12/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
Bonus material: perturbative RG to 2nd order: scan video
10) 11/12/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
11) 15/12/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
12) 18/12/2017: paperboard scans; videos: part1 part2
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Further useful material
1) P. W. Anderson's manifesto: More is Different
2) Pierre Hohenberg's lectures on Ginzburg-Landau theory
http://physics.nyu.edu/~pch2/SelectedRecentWorks.html
3) Nigel Goldenfeld's video tutorial on emergent phenomena
4) Leo P. Kadanoff's video lectures on statistical mechanics http://pirsa.org/C11021
(phase transitions start at lecture #12)
5) Mehran Kardar's video lectures on the statistical physics of fields
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2MaQKFHqYBw
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eKVr-oKxMPg
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Ep48LwBhAQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h_YZxQJpPv0
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9WhnbTT_nS8
(etc...)
6) Scale invariance in the Ising model at the critical point
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PlvisNlAcfo
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fi-g2ET97W8
7) Scale invariance is a specialty of the critical point only: check it out!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MxRddFrEnPc
8) John F. Allen's historical video on superfluidity in Helium
(a showcase of the phenomenology of phase transitions!)
http://guava.physics.uiuc.edu/~nigel/courses/569/video/
9) Undoubtedly, Marylin Monroe and Albert Einstein have been both critically important
to their respective fields of activity. But did you know that, viewed as "critical points",
they belonged to the same universality class?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gfvMU36fgKw
(in fact, one of the main scopes of this class is to understand this joke...)
10) Ising model applet to play with "thermal quenches":
http://physics.weber.edu/schroeder/software/demos/IsingModel.html
