Crystalline solids play an essential role in a diverse range of daily applications.  To understand why certain electrical, magnetic, and optical properties of solids manifest on macroscopic scales, one needs to enter the microscopic realm and investigate properties of electrons, atoms, and their interactions in a periodic lattice environment. This course aims at deepening the student’s understanding over the physical properties of solids, including their phenomenology, microscopic mechanism, open questions, and emergent strategies from the research forefront that can potentially address rising challenges. 

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Topics include: energy bands of the nearly free electron model, tight binding method, Fermi surfaces and their experimental determination, plasmons, polaritons and polarons, optical processes and excitons. We will also cover dielectrics and ferroelectrics, diamagnetism, paramagnetism, ferromagnetism and antiferromagnetism, magnetic resonance, and superconductivity. This course is targeted at physics majors, and is suitable for science and engineering students who already have background knowledge of solid state physics on par with PC3235 Solid State Physics I.