Physics 35200 Statistical Mechanics
Day/Time: (M)WF 09:00 -10:20 am
Location: KPTC 105
Lecturer: Cheng Chin, cchin@uchicago.edu
Office: GCIS 107
Office Hours: WF 10:30-11:30 am
Grader: Paul Spyridis <spiridis@uchicago.edu>
Website: http://ultracold.uchicago.edu/phys_winter13
Class outline:
Thermodynamics
Wk 1 01/09 W Laws of thermodynamics
Wk 1 01/11 F Entropy and thermodynamic potentials
Statistical mechanics
Wk 2 01/16 W Statistical distributions
Wk 2 01/18 F Statistical entropy HW1 HW1solution
Wk 3 01/23 W Statistical ensembles
Wk 3 01/25 F Gibbs distributions
Wk 4 01/30 W Non-interacting systems and equivalence of ensembles
Wk 4 02/01 F Interacting systems (I) HW1 due, HW2 HW2solution
Wk 5 02/04 M Interacting systems (II)
Wk 5 02/06 W Fluctuations and correlations (I)
Wk 5 02/08 F Fluctuations and correlations (II)
Wk 6 02/11 M Non-equilibrium statistical mechanics HW3
Quantum Statistical Mechanics and Phase Transitions
Wk 6 02/13 W Fermi and Bose distributions
Wk 6 02/15 F Mean-field theory, HW2 due
Wk 8 03/01 F Landau's theory of phase transition HW3 due, HW4 (due on 3/15)
Wk 9 03/04 M Critical phenomena
Wk 9 03/06 W Presentations
Wk 9 03/08 F Scale invariance and renormalization group
Evaluation
Problem sets: 50% Term paper (due on 3/11) or presentation: 50% (Guidelines)
Textbooks
Statistical Physics (Vol.5), Landau and Lifshitz
(recommended) Thermodynamics, Enrico Fermi