Lectures on Metals and Superconductors

Lecture notes for an informal seminar series on metals and superconductors.

After a brief hiatus, we’re now taking a significant detour, through the quantum mechanics of identical particles. We’ll return to look at superconductivity in much more detail once we’re done with identical particles. This week’s notes are very much in draft form, and cover the content of several lectures: this week’s notes. They’re also in LaTeX, not handwritten!

Old notes

Handwritten scanned PDF lecture notes, each lecture is typically 10-20 pages long, and between 1 and 2 megabytes, with a few somewhat larger files.

Part I: The Drude Theory of metals

Lecture 1: Introduction to the Drude theory of metals
Lecture 2: Applications of the Drude theory
Lecture 3: AC electrical conductivity of a metal
Lecture 4: Thermal conductivity of a metal

Part II: The Sommerfeld theory of metals

Lecture 5: Ground state properties of a free electron gas
Lecture 6: The Fermi-Dirac distribution
Lecture 7: Energy density and specific heat in a free electron gas
Lecture 8: The Sommerfeld model of metals

Part III: Superconductivity

Lecture 9: Superconductivity: basic facts