Many-Body Theory for Condensed Matter Systems
A graduate-level MIT physics course on the theoretical tools used to describe interacting quantum many-body systems. Lectures and notes build up the path integral formalism, mean-field theories, and the semi-classical treatment of fluctuations around a mean-field state, applying these methods to phenomena in condensed matter such as superconductivity and magnetism. The course emphasizes physical intuition alongside the formal machinery, showing how abstract field-theoretic techniques map onto concrete experimental behavior in solids and quantum fluids. Materials are provided through MIT OpenCourseWare and include lecture notes and problem sets used in MIT's physics graduate curriculum, free to access with no enrollment or certificate fee attached. The course assumes prior graduate quantum mechanics and statistical mechanics, and it targets students preparing for research in condensed matter theory.