Reference request: readable introduction to Landau theory and phase transition

Question

I am doing some self-study on Landau theory and phase transition models in physics. In particular I am looking at how to apply these ideas to opinion dynamics models. I found a really nice set of lecture videos by Jos Thijssen on YouTube, and they have been really excellent. I was hoping someone could recommend a readable treatment of phase transition, Ising model, Landau theory, and renormalization group theory.I was hoping to find something like lecture notes, book, arxiv document, etc.

I have looked at the books by Kardar, and McQuarrie and Schroeder in the past. I believe Kardar has some lecture videos to go with his book, but I found the pace rather too slow. The challenge is that these models are quite complex--meaning that the equations are quite complicated(lots of terms, complicated inner products, etc.). I am saying this as a relatively mathematically mature statistician with a pretty good background in analysis, numerical methods, ODEs/PDEs, etc. So the math is not the issue, but often the derivations skip steps or make off-hand comments to remove terms in an equation, etc. If I were in a classroom, I could ask a professors to explain. But since I am doing self-study, I need a bit more hand-holding in the explanations.

As I said, the videos by Thijssen are really excellent and provide a lot of explanation and intuition. I would like to find a text or set of lecture notes that provide a readable explanation of those derivations, to harden my understanding vis-a-vis the videos.

Answer 1

Try first two chapters of Khomski's "Basic Aspects of the Quantum Theory of Solids": https://www.amazon.com/Basic-Aspects-Quantum-Theory-Solids/dp/0521835216?asin=0521835216&revisionId=&format=4&depth=1. As a matter of facts, I would also recommend to have a look at how Landau himself describes his own theory in the 5th volume of Landau&Lifshits. As to me, it is very intuitive.