This course course will develop the essentials to understand how and
why states of matter may change their defining properties and
transition to other states of matter. How do collective properties
emerge? What characterizes the different phases of matter? Topics to
cover include: Theory of phase transitions. Landau-Ginzburg theory.
Concept of Spontaneous Symmetry Breaking. Scaling hypothesis.
Renormalization Group. Perturbative Renormalization Group. Phase
diagrams and fixed-points. Series expansions.  Quantum Critical
Phenomena. Quantum Scaling. The last part of the course will consider
the important effect of disorder in both electronic and spin (spin
glass) systems. We will introduce the replica method and replica
symmetry breaking.