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Condensed Matter Year 3 :  Hilary Term 2014

Lectures Remaining:  

Next Lecture:  

Our Full Schedule is listed here. .
This is the web page for the course "Condensed Matter Physics" being taught in Hilary term 2014. 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.

We have a message-board / forum for the course!

Videos of lectures will be posted here. (Access limited to Oxford students only for now).
NEW: A survey about your use of the Videos and how to make them more useful is posted here.

I've written a book for this course which is published by Oxford University Press. The book was written do to cover everything that could possibly be asked on an exam. A list of other recommended books is given in an appendix.

(If you prefer to have the book in e-book form that is available as well. If you are feeling cheap, a draft from 2012 is available for free here with at least some of the errors noted here . An HTML version is provided here . Roughly the draft is the same as the book, although quite a few errors have since been removed and some topics have been rearranged a bit.)

Slides and other items from lectures will be posted here. Any known errors from lectures will be corrected here. Known errors in the book (mostly typos in exercises) are posted here .
Here are the suggested Homeworks for 2014 (mostly similar to last year):

Homework 1       Covers:  Einstein and Debye Models of specific heat, Drude and Sommerfeld (free electron) Models of electrons in metal
We should complete the relevant material for doing this assignment by the middle of 2nd week. This homework is medium length.

Homework 2      Covers:  Chemical Bonding, Thermal Expansion, Normal Modes, Phonons.
We should complete the relevant material in lectures by the end of 3rd week. This homework is a bit longer.

Homework 3      Covers:  Crystal Structure, Reciprocal Lattice, X-ray and Neutron Scattering
We should complete the relevant material in lecture by end of 5th week. This homework is a bit shorter.

Homework 4     Covers:  Tight Binding in 1d, Brillouin Zone, Nearly Free Electron Model, Band Structure, Semiconductors.
We should complete the relevant material in lecture by end of 6th week. This homework is medium length.

Homework 5      Covers :  Mean Field Theory and Magnetism.
We should complete the relevant material in lecture eventually. It may be easier to push this assignment into Trinity term. This homework is medium length.

Revision Homework      Some practice for Easter break

Many additional problems are included in the book! You are encouraged to try as many of them as you can! Here are some I posted last year.

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, errors that have been corrected are posted here.

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:

The official syllabus from the course handbook is here .
Here is a sample exam with sample solutions .
Here is the 2011 exam paper with Examiner Report .
Here is the 2012 exam paper with Examiner Report .
Here is the 2013 exam paper with Examiner Report .


Here is a list of Problems on past papers that are on the syllabus back to 1996.
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 (same as 2013)

These Programs are for showing the normal modes of a 1d chain and a 2d crystal.
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Link back to my main page.