Condensed Matter Physics I

Condensed matter is where the quantum mechanics and statistical physics you've already learned stop being about isolated atoms and start explaining why solids actually behave the way they do — why metals conduct, why semiconductors have a gap, why crystals ring at specific frequencies. You'll spend the semester moving from real-space lattices and their reciprocal counterparts up through phonons, the free electron gas, and band theory, working problem sets from Kittel and giving a presentation on a focused topic. It's the foundation for everything device-physics-adjacent — semiconductors, optoelectronics, the follow-up PHYS 446 — and the first course where the abstract machinery of symmetry and Fourier analysis pays off in predictions you can measure.