After successful completion of the course, students are able to

• present the physico-chemical foundations of experimental techniques of materials characterization,
• explain experimental differences between materials in fundamental terms,
• carry out computational chemistry calculations for simple problems involving solids and surfaces,
• formulate experimentally testable hypotheses based on the results of those calculations, and
• take part in the design of new methods in material science.

• Electronic structure as the basis for the description of matter.
• Foundations of solid state physics.
• Description of Surfaces.
• Normal modes and phonons.
• Fundamentals of the spectroscopy of solids.
• Experimental aspects of vibrational spectroscopy.
• Experimental aspects of electron spectroscopy.
• Computational thermodynamics.
• Charge and heat transport.
• Machine learning for materials characterization.
• Materials databases.

Due to the specific restrictions affecting this edition of the course, teaching will be done online. Lectures will be uploaded as videos at the beginning of each week. At the end of the week there will be an online questions-and-answer session.

For data protection purposes, we can only respond to enquiries sent from an official TU (student) e-mail address !

At the end of the semester, students will be given a list of topics related to the contents of the course. They must choose one and prepare a short presentation (either individually on in groups of two) to be delivered over Zoom.