Winter 2013

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