Mediaspace scheduled maintenance: Aug 25, 2026 07:00 - 12:00 AM. During this time, videos will be temporarily unavailable. Check status updates.

Graph
Search

Course

PHYS-475: Statistical physics : theory of phase transitions

Summary

Phase transitions are ubiquitous, from the first instants of the universe to living matter. Despite the vast difference in microscopic details, some features of phase transitions are universal and can be explained by the careful use of statistical mechanics, leading up to the renormalisation group.

Lectures

Instructor

Paolo De Los Rios

Paolo De Los Rios earned his master in Electronic Engineering at the Turin Institute of Technology (Politecnico di Torino) in May 1993. In November 1993 he moved to Trieste, Italy, to enter the PhD program in Theoretical Condensed Matter Theory at the International School for Advanced Studies (SISSA/ISAS) where he obtained the PhD degree in October 1996 for his work on the statistical physics of disordered systems. After a one year postdoc at the Max-Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany, in November 1997 he moved to the University of Fribourg, Switzerland, to join the group of Prof. Yi-Cheng Zhang. There he has worked on various applications of statistical physics to complex systems. In September 2000 he has been appointed Assistant Professor in Statistical Physics of Living Matter and Complex Systems at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland. Since April 2010 he is Associate Professor at the Institute of Theoretical Physics of the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL), Switzerland.

Official source

https://edu.epfl.ch/coursebook/en/statistical-physics-theory-of-phase-transitions-PHYS-475

Moodle Page

http://go.epfl.ch/PHYS-475