Instructor: Nigel Goldenfeld
Time: 10.30am-noon, Mondays and Wednesdays
Place: Loomis Lab 158
Tentative syllabus.
Recommended books
I have not yet written a textbook for this course which covers all the material in the way I teach it. However, past students in this course have found that the books below are useful supplements to my class notes.
(A) General references on spontaneous symmetry breaking, Landau theory and generalized elasticity theory.
P. Chaikin and T. Lubensky. Principles of Condensed Matter Physics.
N. Goldenfeld. Lectures on Phase Transitions and the Renormalization Group.
L.H. Ryder. Quantum Field Theory. There is no quantum field theory per se in the
course, but some students liked the discussion of symmetry breaking in this book.
A. ltland and Ben Simons. Condensed Matter Field Theory. This is an advanced book, but one of the best to learn about the modern approach to condensed matter theory, with many-body theory done by functional integral techniques, and a clear and readable presentation of many technical issues.
(B) Off-diagonal long-range order and condensates
J. Annett. Superconductivity, Superfluids and Condensates.
C.J. Pethick and H. Smith. Bose-Einstein Condensation in Dilute Gases
(C) Superconductivity
M. Tinkham. Introduction to Superconductivity.
(D) Liquid Crystals
P.G. de Gennes. The Physics of Liquid Crystals.
(E) Quantum Hall Effects
M. Stone. The Quantum Hall Effect.
(F) Biological emergence
S. Strogatz. Sync
C. R. Woese. On the evolution of cells, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. USA 99, 8742-7 (2002).
(G) Pattern Formation
M. Cross and P. Hohenberg. Pattern Formation Outside of Equilibrium, Reviews of Modern Physics 65, 851-1112 (1993).
Complexity and emergent phenomena are very much frontier topics across disciplines of science. As an example, here is a report recently issued by the US Department of Energy on the importance of this topic.
2007 Fall Term Essays are here
2006 Fall Term Essays are here
2006 Spring Term Essays are here
2004 Fall Term essays are here.
2004 Spring Term essays are here.
2002 Term essays are here.
Please register for the email list for the class, so that last minute announcements, class cancellations etc. can be sent to you.
Course gradebook for the full course.
Lecture notes for the course are available online.
Handouts and Assignments
Course
details
Revision of 2nd Quantisation
Data
Here is a set of real experimental data on the penetration depth of the high temperature superconductor YBCO, which were published in S. Kamal, D. Bonn, N. D. Goldenfeld, Hirschfeld, R. Liang and W. N. Hardy. Penetration depth measurements of 3D XY critical behaviour in YBa2Cu3O6.95 crystals. Phys. Rev. Lett. 73, 1845-1848 (1994).
Instead of a final exam, this course will have a term paper assignment. The subject matter can be any topic in physics which is related to Emergent States of Matter in some sense. Since many interesting phenomena are a manifestation of spontaneous symmetry breaking, you have unusual latitude in your choice of topic. It need not be restricted to condensed matter but can cover the many recent and exciting developments in other areas of science, including, but not limited, to: high energy physics, cosmology, even biology. I hope many of you will chose topics in these non-condensed matter areas.
I have no objection to people choosing to write about their own research area if it falls within the scope of the course. Some of you may, however, feel the need to broaden your outlook by literature searching a topic that is new to you.
I can provide you with a guide to the literature for many topics if you come and ask me. However, I really don't want to do this. Part of this assignment is to give you an opportunity to develop the skills in doing a literature survey and digging up information from the library. Other important components of this assignment are that you demonstrate good taste, curiosity and ambition in your choice of subject, and that you are capable of distilling the most important and essential details from very technical papers.
Some hints: look at the back of the current Reviews of Modern Physics where you will find a listing of topics that have been reviewed in the last ten years or so. These are always a good starting point. Similarly for journals such as Advances in Physics and Reports of Progress in Physics. Use internet keyword searches on http://xxx.lanl.gov archives and search engines such as Google.
Don't be restricted by the topics that we addressed in class. We didn't have time to cover the huge variety of emergent states of matter that arise in the real world. Here is a partial list of subject areas to prompt your thinking:
Exotic superfluidity
Superfluid phenomena in Helium 3
Superfluid phenomena in neutron stars
Superfluid phenomena in nuclei
Exotic superconductivity
Heavy fermion superconductors
Unconventional pairing states in cuprate superconductors
Unconventional pairing states in non-cuprate superconductors
Fluctuation effects in superconductors
Vortex liquids, glasses and other aspects of the magnetic phase diagram of the cuprates
Liquid crystals
Analogies between liquid crystals and superconductors
Smectic phases in liquid crystals
Dynamics of topological defects in liquid crystals
Phase transition kinetics in liquid crystals
Blue phases
Emergent states of matter
Ordered phases in optical lattices (superfluid, Mott insulators, ...)
Quantum hall states of rapidly rotating BECs
Magnetic states of condensed matter (ferromagnets, antiferromagnets, spin glass, ...)
Disordered states of matter (Griffiths phases, random field Ising models, localization, ...)
High energy physics
Phases of quantum chromodynamics
Recent experimental puzzles from RHIC
Quark-gluon plasma and its dynamics
Cosmology
The electroweak phase transition in the early universe and its consequences
Cosmological manifestations of strings and other topological defects
Space-time as an emergent phenomenon
Phase transitions and inflationary cosmology
Nonequilibrium systems
Collective behaviour in animals (herding, flocking, schooling, ...)
Traffic flow (shocks, phase diagram, pedestrians ...)
Reaction-diffusion patterns
Convection effects in fluids
Bioconvection
Emergence of network properties (WWW, metabolic networks, ...)
Evolution
Synchronisation of coupled oscillators
Detailed Directions
The purpose of your essay is to explain why the problem is interesting, what has been done, and what are the conclusions. Don't go into unnecessary technical details. The amount that you personally chose to work through the technical details is up to you; my goal is that you understand the broad issues. Hopefully you will find your topic sufficiently interesting that you will wish to delve deeper (and perhaps even think for yourself about the subject). You should imagine that you are writing the paper for a reader who is like you were before you started thinking about your topic. Every essay must include some sort of discussion of experiment or observations: these can either be the focus of the essay, or at least must be mentioned specifically with regard to how they demonstrate, provide counter-examples to, or otherwise inform theory. Essays which are purely theoretical will receive a relatively lower grade than others. More detailed suggestions about format are given below.
The final exam/paper is due by 11am Tue Dec 11, 2007. No excuses for lateness will be accepted unless there are extenuating circumstances or previous arrangements have been made, in accord with University regulations. It should not be less than 8 pages long, single spaced 12 point font, including figures. It should be no more than 12 pages long, single spaced 12 point font, including figures. I will not read more than 12 pages of an essay. You have been warned!
Your essay must be written in an electronic format, including the figures, if any. Figures may be scanned, captured electronically using screen capture programs, or generated electronically: hard copy can be scanned in if necessary using the Physics Department's resources. Ultimately, all essays will be posted on the WWW. The format for submission will ONLY be an Acrobat PDF file. For those of you using MS Word, I can convert a Word file into PDF, but you must give me a day in advance of the due date to do that, please. Each essay should include a cover page which will consist of the following (a) Title and author's name. (b) abstract. The essays should also have a decent set of references, which should include particularly good review articles.
Submission instructions:
(A) Convert your essay to a PDF file. If you have electronic figures, try to include them directly at the end or in the middle of your essay using the tex commands. If you are having difficulty making your figures electronic, then either leave them out, or scan them in. There is a scanner in the computer office inside the mailroom.
(B) Name your essay according to the following scheme
<Your last name>.pdf
(Example: goldenfeld.pdf)
(C) Email to Nigel Goldenfeld <nigel@uiuc.edu>
Make the subject heading of your email
569 ESM <Your last name>.pdf
and have in the body of the email your name, the title and a brief abstract of your essay.
EXAMPLE
************************************************************
To: nigel@uiuc.edu
From: smith@uiuc.edu
Subject: 569 ESM smith.pdf
-------------------------------------
Author: Freda Smith
Title: Critical dynamics of the superconducting transition
Abstract:
This essay describes the observations, computer simulations, and analytic theory of critical fluctuation contributions to the electrical and thermal conductivity near the superconducting transition of the high temperature superconductors YBCO and BSCCO.
***********************************************************
Format:
Your paper should have approximately the following structure, but feel free to modify it to fit your chosen topic. Here are some suggestions for the sorts of questions your paper should address to make it most useful to the reader. As you will see, the purpose is not to focus too much on technical details.
Introduction and Background:
What hypotheses are being tested in this paper?
What information induced the authors to perform the experiments/theory?
What new methods or insights brought to bear on the problem?
Why did you chose to write about this topic?
Why is this interesting or important?
Methods:
What are the critical methods of the paper?
What enabling technologies are used?
What are the weaknesses of the methods used?
Are there other or better approaches that could be used?
Results and Discussion
What are the primary conclusions of the paper?
Did the authors prove their hypotheses?
What novel information or directions come from this work?
What control experiments were performed? (If appropriate)
What assumptions still remain in the work?
How could these assumptions be tested?
What other explanations for the observations are still possible?
What would you do next to advance this field?
Term essays from previous years
Nigel Goldenfeld