Lectures: Thursdays 16:15, room 1.38
Tutorials: Wednesdays 12:15, room 2.06
Mid-term exam: Monday 21/11/2021, 09:15 - 13:00, room 1.02,
Final exam (written): Wednesday 01/02/2022, 09:15 - 13:00, room 1.02 [exam], [sketched solutions]
Final exam (oral): Monday, Tuesday 06-07/02/2022, from 09:15
Retake (written): Tuesday 21/02/2022, 09:15 - 13:00, room 1.03
Retake (oral): Wednesday 22/02/2022, from 09:15
Here are the key concepts of the course. You might orient your preparations around them. During the oral exam I will ask you two questions from this list.
We follow "Statistical Mechanics" by R. K. Pathria and P. D. Beale. The numbering of section used below follows the third edition of the book. Here is its table of content.
| The statistical basis of thermodynamics | Sections 1.1 - 1.6 |
| Ensemble theory and the microcanonical ensemble | Sections 2.1 - 2.5 |
| The canonical ensemble | Sections 3.1 - 3.9 (without "The method of mean values" of 3.2) |
| The grand canonical ensemble | Sections 4.1 - 4.7 |
| Quantum statistics | Sections 5.1 - 5.5 |
| Simple gases | Sections 6.2 and 6.3 |
| Ideal Bose gas | Sections 7.1, 7.3 and 7.4 |
| Ideal Fermi gas | Sections 8.1 - 8.3 |
| Interacting systems | Sections 10.1 - 10.3 (general idea + computations of the second virial coefficient) |
| Phase transitions | Sections 12.1 - 12.7, 12.10 and 13.2 |
Extra material: 3.10, 6.5, 7.2, 7.6, 8.4, 8.5, 9.
| Tutorial 1 (05.10.2022) | Tutorial 2 (12.10.2022) | Tutorial 3 (19.10.2022) | Tutorial 4 (26.10.2022) |
| Tutorial 5 (02.11.2022) | Tutorial 6 (09.11.2022) | Tutorial 7 (16.11.2022) | Tutorial 8 (23.11.2022) |
| Tutorial 9 (30.11.2022) | Tutorial 10 (07.12.2022) | Tutorial 11 (14.12.2022) | Tutorial 12 (21.12.2022) |
| Tutorial 13 (11.01.2023) | Tutorial 14 (18.01.2023) | Tutorial 15 (25.01.2023) |
Notes on ultra-relativistic particles in the microcanonical ensemble.
"The Ising model in our dimension and our times" by Andrei Okounkov
"More is different" by Philip Anderson