Requirements/prerequisites:

Duration: Michaelmas term, 11 weeks

Number of lectures per week: 3 lectures including tutorials per week

Assessment:

ECTS credits: 5
End-of-year Examination: This module will be examined jointly with MA3444 in a 3-hour examination in Trinity term, except that those taking just one of the two modules will have a 2 hour examination. However there will be separate results for MA3443 and MA3444.

Description:

Learning Outcomes: On successful completion of this module, students will be able to:

• work with the formalism of equilibrium thermodynamics;

• describe the characteristics of a phase transition of first order;

• demonstrate a basic understanding of how macroscopic equilibrium prop- erties arise from the underlying microscopic physics, as defined by classical mechanics;

• show familiarity with the notion of ensembles and apply an information theoretical argument to find the most likely ensemble compatible with given micro and macro constraints;

• demonstrate understanding that the choice of ensemble becomes irrelevant in the thermodynamic limit as a consequence of the central limit theorem;

• derive the equation of state for a non-interacting system of N mass points;

• include interactions systematically by means of the high temperature and virial expansions;

• derive the van der-Waals equation of state by applying a mean field argument;

• apply the methods of statistical physics to simple model systems.