Statistical Physics

Cornell Physics 7653, Fall 2009 James Sethna, sethna@lassp.cornell.edu, 528 Clark, 5-5132 Tuesday, Thursday 10:10-11:25, Rockefeller 230 http://www.physics.cornell.edu/sethna/teaching/653/

Ideas and methods developed in studying continuous phase transitions have become widely applied throughout physics. Renormalization-group methods are used not only for thermodynamic critical points, but for studying the onset of chaos, percolation of oil-bearing porous rock, earthquakes and avalanches at depinning transitions, quantum fluctuations, correlated metals and Fermi liquids, the motion of interfaces, and the flocking of birds and wildebeests. Conversely, new ideas from string theory and mathematics have led to a deeper understanding of critical phenomena in two dimensions. Statistical physics this semester will attempt to provide an introduction into all of these subjects.

The course is designed for graduate students in physics who have taken a semester of graduate-level statistical mechanics.

Likely topics

1. Fluctuations, continuous transitions and critical phenomena
2. Mean-field theory, bifurcations, & normal forms
3. The idea behind the renormalization group
4. Phase diagrams, fixed points, & scaling
5. ε-expansions
6. Kosterlitz-Thouless and the lower critical dimension
7. Flocking, hydrodynamics, and noise
8. Random systems and glasses
9. Conformal invariance and SLE
10. Quantum critical points
11. Fermi liquid theory and the renormalization group

Required texts

• John Cardy, "Scaling and Renormalization in Statistical Physics", Cambridge University Press, 1996.
• "Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity", Sethna, Oxford (2006). (Online at http://pages.physics.cornell.edu/sethna/StatMech/.)

• Course Wiki (group projects)
• Homework exercises
• Other texts and references

Statistical Mechanics: Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity, now available at Oxford University Press (USA, Europe).