Physics 880A20  (Autumn 2007)

                                        Many Body Physics I

Instructor: Mohit Randeria 
                 randeria@mps.ohio-state.edu                                                              

Day & Time: Mon. & Wed.,  2:30 - 4:18 PM                                               

Room: AV 115

This is Part I of a two-quarter course on non-relativistic many-body theory.
Part II will be taught in the Winter 2008 quarter

Prerequisites: It is essential that students have already taken graduate courses in
Quantum Mechanics (827, 828 & 829 or equivalent) and
Statistical Mechanics (846 & 847 or equivalent).
In addition, I will assume that the students have some knowledge of complex variables
including contour integration, poles, residues, branch cuts etc.

If you have not already taken the prerequisite courses, you must take the instructor's
permission before registering for this course.

Course Information in pdf format:  CourseInfo.pdf

Goal:

In Many Body Physics I & II, students will learn:

The goal of these two courses is to help students understand how interactions affect the collective properties
of many particle systems. In some cases, interactions lead to "emergent" properties like superconductivity,
magnetism, and the fractional quantum Hall effect, which are not observed in non-interacting systems.
In other cases interactions, even if they are strong, do not lead to qualitative changes and produce only
quantitative renormalizations, as in the case of metals and normal He-3, which are well described by Landau
Fermi liquid theory. 

Syllabus:

An optimistic plan for the Autumn Quarter is to introduce the following techniques:

and to illustrate these techniques with an analysis of

Among the topics I plan to cover in Part II (winter quarter) are

Grading:
                        (1) Homework problems will be assigned periodically.

                        (2) Each student will have to write a term paper
                             Title/topic: due Oct. 1; Outline: due Oct 29; Term paper: due Nov. 21

Text Book: 
No one book covers all the material that I plan to teach in the two quarter sequence.
For the first quarter, the assigned text book is:
"Quantum Theory of Many-Particle Systems" by A. L. Fetter and J. D. Walecka, (Dover, 2003).
A rather inexpensive Dover edition is available and is well worth owning, even though I will not follow it in detail.

References:  Other useful references are:

"Methods of Quantum Field Theory in Statistical Physics", A. A. Abrikosov, L. P. Gorkov and I. E. Dzyaloshinski, (Dover, 1975).
AGD is the universally acknowledged classic text in the field, but may be difficult for most beginners.

Piers Coleman's Lectures on Many Body Physics http://www.physics.rutgers.edu/~coleman/mbody.html
A modern introduction to the subject.

"Green's Functions in Solid State Physics" by S. Doniach and E. Sondheimer (world Scientific, 1998).

"Many-Particle Physics" by G. Mahan (Kluwer/Plenum, 2000).

"Quantum Many-Particle Systems" by J. W. Negele and H. Orland (Westview, 1998).
 Particularly useful for its chapters on coherent state path integrals

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Home Work Assignments:

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Announcements:

(1) Extra class: Friday, October 5  at 2:30 PM  in Room AV 115 (our regular classroom)

(2) No class on Wednesday, October 10

(3) Extra classes: Friday, Nov. 2  at 2:30 PM  in AV 115
                                  Friday, Nov. 9  at 2:30 PM  in AV 115

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Grader:         Qi Zhou (qzhou@mps.ohio-state.edu)

If you have any questions, please contact me:

Office: Physics Research Building, Room 2024
Phone: 292 2457
Email: randeria@mps.ohio-state.edu