Venue: Emmy Noether Seminar Room
First Meeting: 9 January 2024
Class Timings: Tuesdays & Thursdays from 11:30 AM - 1:00 PM
Course Description
- Recap of Fundamentals of thermodynamics, Probability, distributions
- Kinetic theory of gases: BBGKY hierarchy, Boltzmann equation, H-Theorem and Irreversibility
- Foundations of equilibrium statistical mechanics —- Liouville’s equation, microstate, macrostate, phase space, typicality ideas, (Little on irreversible evolution of macrostate), Kac ring, equal a priori probability, ensembles as tools in statistical mechanics.
- Partition functions, connection to thermodynamical free energies, Response functions
- Examples: Non-interacting systems —— Classical ideal gas, Harmonic oscillator, paramagnetism, adsorption, 2 level systems, molecules, more non-standard examples.
- Formulation of quantum statistical mechanics —— Quantum microstates, Quantum macro-states, density matrix.
- Quantum statistical mechanical systems —— Dilute polyatomic gases, Vibrations of solid, Black body radiation
- Quantum ideal gases —— Hilbert space of identical particles —— Fermi gas, Pauli paramagnetism —— Bose gas, BEC —— phonons, photons —— Landau diamagnetism
- Interacting classical gas ——— Mean field theory, Ising Model, virial expansions and Van-der Waals Gas
- Introduction to simulation methods
- Introduction to Phase transitions and Critical phenomena.
References
Apart from the standard text books (Landau-Lifshitz, Pathria, Huang, Kardar volumes I and II), I have found the following books useful.
1. Chaikin and Lubensky, Principles of Condensed Matter Physics, (chapters 3-5,7,8).
2. Plischke and Bergersen, Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics.
3. Goldenfeld, Lectures on Phase transitions and the Renormalization Group.
4. Sethna, Entropy, Order Parameters, and Complexity.
5. Lecture notes of Daniel Arovas (PDF files available at his website)
Prerequisites: Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics by F. Reif.
- Teacher: Chandan Dasgupta
- Teacher: Abhishek Dhar
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