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Condensed Matter Year 3 :  Hilary Term 2012

Lectures Remaining:   0 (!)

Good Luck on Exams!

Our Full Schedule is listed here. .
This is the web page for the course "Condensed Matter Physics" being taught in Hilary term 2012. This course is section VI of the third year syllabus.   My opinion is that the name of this course should be changed to "Solid State Physics" since that is more accurately the topic covered.

The official syllabus from the course handbook is here .

I've written some Extensive Lecture Notes (more or less a book, now updated to a final 2012 edition, Jan 9. An HTML version is provided here . ) which are meant to cover everything that could possibly be asked on an exam. A list of recommended books is given in the preface. Any crucial corrections to the notes will be listed here. Slides and other items from Lectures are posted here.
Here are the suggested Homeworks for 2012:

Homework 1       Covers:  Einstein and Debye Models of specific heat, Drude and Sommerfeld (free electron) Models of electrons in metal
This homework is medium length. We should complete the relevant material for doing this assignment by the middle of 2nd week.
Homework 2      Covers:  Chemical Bonding, Thermal Expansion, Normal Modes, Phonons.
This homework is a bit longer. The tight binding question from last year is moved to the next homework. We should complete the relevant material in lectures by the end of 3rd week.
Homework 3      Covers:  Crystal Structure, Reciprocal Lattice, X-ray and Neutron Scattering, Tight Binding in 1d
This homework is a bit shorter. We should complete the relevant material in lecture by end of 5th week.
 Homework 4     Covers:  Brillouin Zone, Nearly Free Electron Model, Band Structure, Semiconductors.
This homework is medium length. We should complete the relevant material in lecture by beginning of 7th week.
Homework 5      Covers :  Mean Field Theory and Magnetism.
This homework is medium length. We should complete the relevant material in lecture evntually. It may be easier to push this assignment into Trinity term.
Revision Homework      Some practice for Easter break
Additional Problems      For those who just can't get enough of this subject (Note: Some are slightly off-topic). I'll add more as I think of them.

The Homeworks posted here have had as many errors and typos removed from them as possible (and will be updated immediately if any other errors are found). In case you have an old version of the homeworks, a history of correction of errors is here (includes update history for tutor's notes).

For even more questions to practice with, look at previous year B2 exams. Ignore questions on photonics, device physics, superconductivity, and symmetries. Other than that, most questions should be fair game.
Other useful resources:

Here is a sample exam with sample solutions .
Here is the 2011 exam paper with Examiner Report .
Here is a list of Problems on past papers that are on the syllabus from 1996-2010.
Here is a Statistical analysis of which subjects have been examined on past papers back to 2004.
Here is a Annotation of all the Homework Problems describing which ones to study most for the exam

These Programs are for showing the normal modes of a 1d chain and a 2d crystal.
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