Tuesday 13:40 - 15:30 (2 hours) Room U3
Thursday 13:40-14:30 (1 hour) Room P3
Follow this page for updates and also join Slack workspace for this course in here.
(*) All lectures and exams will be face-to-face.
CK ▸ Introduction to Solid State Physics, Charles Kittel, 8th Edition, Wiley, 2004.
There are a lot of good books on the topic but we will try to follow CK and not get distracted with other books as best as we can. CK is somewhat outdated but everything we need is there.
Two additional standard references for some advanced topics:
AA ▸ Introduction to the theory of normal metals, Abrikosov, Aleksej Alekseevič, (translated by A. Baratoff) New York: Academic Press, 1972.
A&M ▸ Solid state physics, Neil W. Ashcroft and N. David Mermin, Holt-Saunders, 1976.
Occasionally, we may use material from the following book for some topics related to recent research problems:
G&Y ▸ Modern condensed matter physics, Girvin, Steven M., and Kun Yang. Cambridge University Press, 2019.
Attendance 10%, Homework 40%, Quiz 10%, 2 Midterms each 20%, and Final Exam 20% (Total 120). Letter grades will be given as follows
AA (85), BA (75), BB (65), CB (55), CC(50), DC (40), DD(30), FD(20), FF (0)
Some guidelines you can follow in problem solutions:
(1) Show genuine interest and effort.
(2) Keep your work clean, well organized, and concise.
(3) Demonstrate your understanding of the main goal.
No credit is allocated for "correct solution", or "right answer."
By registration, you are assumed to accept the code of ethics & core values of METU and commit to maintain academic honesty and integrity for this course.
Any form of academic misconduct, including cheating in homework and exams, is prohibited. Looking for solutions on the internet is strongly disapproved, even if you "understand the solution first and then write it down." You cannot learn anything by looking at the read-made solutions. If you do your own work with honest effort, you will get full credit regardless of your solutions validity, see grading guidelines.
Team work and group discussions are allowed and also encouraged for homework but do not copy and paste somebody else's solution.
Phonons and thermodynamics of phonons (Lecture notes)
Week 1: Dynamics of crystal vibrations (Quiz #1)
Week 2: Phonon thermodynamics, second quantization of phonons (Quiz #2)
Homework #1 (Due Nov. 2)
Free electron Fermi gas (Lecture notes)
Week 3: Fermi-Dirac distribution, electron heat capacity
Week 4: Boltzmann transport, electrical and thermal conductivity, motion in magnetic field
Homework #2 (Due Nov. 17)
Energy bands (Lecture notes)
Week 5: Nearly Free electrons, Bloch's theorem (Quiz #3)
Week 6: Metals vs insulators, tight binding model (Quiz #4)
Homework #3 (Due Nov. 30)
Midterm 1 (Nov. 25)
Semiconductors (Lecture notes)
Week 7: Band gap, effective mass, electrons and holes
Week 8: Thermal equilibrium of electrons and holes, doping, thermoelectric effect
Homework #4 (Due Dec. 14)
Metals and Fermi surface (Lecture notes)
Week 9: Fermi surface, Electron and hole orbits, tight binding model (Quiz #5)
Week 10: Fermi surface and magnetic field, de Haas-van Alphen effect
Homework #5 (Due Jan. 4)
Midterm 2 (Dec 23)
Magnetism (Lecture notes)
Week 11: Diamagnetism and paramagnetism, susceptibility of conduction electrons (Quiz #6)
Week 12: Ferromagnetism, magnons, quantization of spin waves, antiferromagnetic order, domain walls
Homework #6 (Due Jan. 18)
Superconductivity (Lecture notes)
Week 13: Experiments on superconductivity: Meisner effect, heat capacity, energy gap, isotope effect
Week 14: London equations, Josephson effect, Ginzburg-Landau formalism (Quiz #7)
Final Exam (Jan 29, 9:30 AM, room P7)
Steven H. Simon's The Oxford solid state physics lectures. These lectures are very accessible for undergraduate students and maybe even for non-physics students. There is also an excellent book by the same lecturer.
G. Rangarajan's lectures from the Department of Physics, IIT Madras.
Sergey Frolov's lectures from the University of Pittsburgh.
Sandro Scandolo's lecture at The Abdus Salam International Centre for Theoretical Physics (ICTP) in Italy, Trieste.