Typed Notes (Partial)

Aya al Zarka has kindly typed up the handwritten lecture notes part of the way through the material covering Chapter 5 of Sethna's book. You can find that on the Course Materials page.

Online Introduction to Renormalization and Universality

One of the more difficult conceptual topics in this module concerns renormalization groups.

Just posted on the arXiv today are some nice-looking lecture notes from some summer school that aims to give an introduction to renormalization and universality.

These notes look pretty good, so you might want to take a look at them when we get to that part of the module. I am posting this today because I am just seeing these now and I might forget to post this link later. We're not going to get to renormalization until close to the end of the module, so this introduction is actually for several weeks from now.

Part III of Lecture Notes Posted

I have now posted p. 40a-48a of the lecture notes. This takes us through the end of Chapter 12 of Sethna's book and should basically get us to the end of lecture 14.

The two lectures in week 8 will be on a 'special topic' to be determined. If there are any particular topics that interest you, please let me know. It is my intention for the last couple of lectures to vary from year to year depending on student interest.

Lectures Notes: Pages 1a--39b

I have posted pages 1a-20b and 21a-39b on the course website. I'll estimate that there will be somewhere between 54 and 60 pages in total (so twice that many sides), with around 54 being more likely than around 60.

It will be a while before I post the remaining lecture notes (which I need to finish preparing) and homework sheets.

As I mentioned in an earlier entry, I am following Jim Sethna's book (freely available online) closely. Thus far, I am following it---though with some small differences based on whether I agree with what is written or want to change or add perspective on certain details---except a small unit on "nonequilibrium statistical mechanics" in which I gave an introduction to kinetic theory (this topic isn't covered in Sethna). There are, of course, numerous other topics in nonequilibrium statistical mechanics---it is a huge subject---and some of them show up briefly in other parts of the lecture notes, though in those cases there are discussions (for the notes I have prepared thus far) in Sethna's book.