Solid State Physics
Interactive Notes
Preface
These are interactive notes for the Solid State Physics course in the Master’s Degree in Physics.
Key idea behind this document. Learning physics involves several complementary skills:
- proficiency in the rigorous and sometimes tedious manipulation of mathematical formulas;
- development of “physics sense”, to anticipate results without going through every math step;
- visualization skills, enabling one to mentally “see” the solution to a given problem.
Developing them takes time and requires moving back and forth between formulas and graphs, sketching ideas on paper, exploring the effect of specific parameters, and considering limiting cases, among other things. The interactive tools included in these notes are intended to facilitate this process.
Misuse of interactive tools. Interactive figures hopefully help a faster grasp of concepts (especially in a course like Solid State Physics, where geometric complexity often outweighs conceptual hurdles). Still, students should never underestimate the value of sketching geometries and derivations by hand. It is thus strongly advised to regularly set aside the digital tools, take a piece of paper, and attempt to manually reconstruct the visualizations and spatial concepts presented here.
Use of AI. The composition of these note was supported by AI tools in the following ways: (1) translation to javascript of pre-existing jupyter notebook for the visualization of solid states concepts; (2) refining of new figures, in particular form the user interaction point of view. Figures are based on javascript and are not intended for direct consultation, nevertheless they were designed to be relatively easy to understand and organized so that physics-related code and constants are confined in specific sections of the code.
Optional sections. Sections tagged with the icon contain optional material, meaning they cover topics, discussions or concepts that, while interesting in my opinion, fall outside the core syllabus of the course… so they can be safely skipped.
Acks & thanks. I thank the Solid State Physics students: their appreciation for my old Matlab and later Python interactive scripts provided the main motivation to develop this pilot project. Here, those scripts have been converted into more interactive (and faster, to my surprise) JavaScript figures, and a few more have been created from scratch. Code details are now somewhat more opaque, but a separate Binder repository will soon be created and devoted to more streamlined Python scripts, allowing students to easily play with code, even without installing Python. A special thanks also goes to M. Spissu and M. Monti for producing two independent sets of lecture notes, which served as a good starting point for these pages.
This document is an editorial test for the translation of solid state physics lecture notes into the Quarto interactive book format. It is a work in progress, not a definitive or polished publication, and is not intended for public distribution. If it is hosted on a public repository, this is solely for the purpose of testing the rendering of graphics and the execution of JavaScript-based interactive figures without requiring a local installation.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
© 2025–2026 Stefano Roddaro · University of Pisa