Structure of matter

Nowadays in most Universities the studies are organized with a first period of three or four years, common to all the students and devoted to elementary aspects of the Physics, followed by a more advanced program in rather specialized fields. The difficult task is to provide a common and formative introduction in the first period, still suitable as a basis for building up more advanced courses and thus to bridge the large area between elementary physics and the topics pertaining to research activities.This textbook is essentially an attempt towards that aim and it is based on a mixture of simplified institutional theory and solved problems.The hope, in this way, is to provide physical insights, basic culture and motivation, without deteriorating the possibility of more advanced subsequent learning.The choice has been to limit the attention to key concepts and to the most typical aspects of atoms, molecules and solids, looking at the basic "structural" aspects without dealing in detail with the properties originating from them. The problems are entangled to the formal presentation of the arguments, being designed as an intrinsic part of the pathway the student should move by in order to grasp the key concepts.The purpose of the melange intuition-theory-exercises pursued in the text is to favour the acquisition of the basic knowledge in the wide and wonderful field of the condensed matter, emphasizing how phenomenological properties originate from the microscopic, quantum features of the nature.