Statistical Physics
This is an introductory course on Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics given to final year undergraduates. Full lecture notes come in around 190 pages. Individual chapters and problem sets can also be found below.
These lecture notes can also be viewed in HTML format which may be more accessible for screen readers.
“My memory for figures, otherwise tolerably accurate, always lets me down when I am counting beer glasses.”
Ludwig Boltzmann
Fundamentals of Statistical Mechanics
Introduction; Microcanonical Ensemble; Entropy and the Second Law; Temperature; Two-State Spin System; First Law of Thermodynamics; Canonical Ensemble; Energy Fluctuations; Chemical Potential; Grand Canonical Ensemble.
Classical Gases
Classical Partition Functions; Ideal Gas; Equipartition; Maxwell Distribution; Diatomic Gas; Interactions; van der Waals Equation of State; Cluster Expansion; Debye-Huckel model.
Quantum Gases
Density of States; Blackbody Radiation; Debye Model of Vibrations in a Solid; Diatomic Gas Revisted, Bose-Einstein Distribution and Bose-Einstein Condensation; Fermi-Dirac Distribution and Fermi Gas; White Dwarfs; Pauli Paramagnetism; Landau Diamagnetism.
Classical Thermodynamics
Temperature and the Zeroth Law; The First Law; The Second Law; Carnot Cycles; Entropy; Adiabatic Surfaces; Maxwell Relations; The Third Law.
Phase Transitions
van der Waals equation Revisited; Phase Equilibrium; Maxwell Construction; Clausius-Clapyron Equation; Critical Point; Ising Model; Mean Field Theory; Critical Exponents; Ising Chain; Low Temperature Expansion and Peierls Droplets; High Temperature Expansion; Kramers-Wannier Duality; Landau Theory; Lee-Yang Zeros; Landau-Ginzburg Theory; Fluctuations and Correlations.