Courses:

Help support MIT OpenCourseWare by shopping at Amazon.com! MIT OpenCourseWare offers direct links to Amazon.com to purchase the books cited in this course. Click on the Amazon logo to the left of any citation and purchase the book from Amazon.com, and MIT OpenCourseWare will receive up to 10% of all purchases you make. Your support will enable MIT to continue offering open access to MIT courses.

8.044 (Statistical Physics I) and 8.05 (Quantum Physics II)

The textbook for this class is:

Kittel, Charles. Introduction to Solid State Physics. 8th ed. New York, NY: John Wiley & Sons, 2004. ISBN: 9780471415268.

A useful reference is:

Ashcroft, Neil W., and N. David Mermin. Solid State Physics. New York, NY: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1976. ISBN: 9780030839931.

There will be three in-class exams and a final exam. All exams are open-book and open-note exams.

There will be 10 problem sets, assigned roughly once a week.

• Periodic structure and symmetry of crystals
• Diffraction, reciprocal lattice
• Chemical bonding
• Lattice dynamics
• Phonons
• Thermal properties
• Free electron gas
• Model of metals
• Bloch theorem and band structure
• Nearly free electron approximation
• Tight binding method
• Fermi surface
• Semiconductors
• Electrons
• Holes
• Impurities
• Optical properties
• Excitons
• Magnetism