School of Mathematics School of Mathematics
Course 443, Statistical Physics 2006-07 (JS, SS Theoretical Physics, SS Mathematics, SS Two-subject Moderatorship)
Lecturer: Dr. Stefan Sint
Requirements/prerequisites: 241
Duration: 21 weeks
Number of lectures per week: 3
Assessment:
End-of-year Examination: One 3-hour examination

Description:

Review of Thermodynamics. Classical Statistical Mechanics: microcanonical, canonical and grand canonical ensembles. Classical ideal gas, inclusion of interactions, van-der Waals gas, the cluster expansion and virial coefficients, first order phase transition. Quantum Statistical Mechanics: density matrix formalism, Fermi-Dirac and Bose-Einstein statistics, free Fermi gas, free Bose gas, Bose-Einstein condensation, photon gas (black body radiation), phonons in a solid (Debye model). Chemical reactions, law of mass action. Applications to Astrophysics: white dwarf stars, Saha ionisation formula, neutron stars. Magnetic properties of Fermi systems: Landau diamagnetism, Pauli paramagnetism. Ising Model of a Ferromagnet, brief introduction to mean field theory, critical phenomena and the renormalisation group.

Textbooks:

  1. L.D. Landau and E.M. Lifshitz, ``Statistical Physics''
  2. K. Huang, `Statistical Mechanics''
  3. I. Sachs, S. Sen and J. Sexton, Ëlements of Statistical Mechanics"
  4. R. K. Pathria, ``Statistical Mechanics''

Mar 26, 2007

File translated from TEX by TTH, version 2.70.
On 26 Mar 2007, 20:06.