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PHY 418: Statistical Mechanics I
Prof. S. Teitel stte@pas.rochester.edu ---- Spring 2012

April

January | February | March | April | May

Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday
1 2

lecture 19

classical partition function in the occupation number representation, average occupation number, the classical vs quantum limits of the ideal gas, the quantized harmonic oscillator as bosons

HW #4 due

3 4

lecture 20

Debye model for the specific heat of a solid, black body radiation

5 6

lecture 21

quantum ideal gas, standard functions, pressure, density, energy, the leading correction to the classical limit

7
8 9

lecture 22

degenerate Fermi gas, ground state energy, the Sommerfeld expansion, chemical potential at finite temperature, specific heat, Pauli paramagnetism

extended lecture

10 11

lecture 23

Pauli paramagnetism continued, ideal Bose gas

HW #5 due

12 13 14
15 16

lecture 24

Bose-Einstein condensation in an ideal gas of free bosons

17 18

lecture 25

BEC in laser cooled atomic gases, classical spin models, constant magnetization vs constant magnetic field ensembles

19 20 21
22 23

lecture canceled

24 25

lecture 26

broken symmetry and the possibility for a phase transition in the thermodynamic limit, Ising phase diagram

26 27

lecture 27

mean-field solution of the Ising model, critical exponents

28
29 30

lecture 28

mean-field solution and critical exponents continued, Maxwell construction, Landau theory of phase transitions, the liquid-gas transition

HW #6 due