February

February

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Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

1
lecture 6

curvature of free energies and stability requirements for response functions, kinetic theory of ideal gas, Maxwell velocity distribution

lecture 6 supplement

heat engines, thermodynamic efficiency, Carnot cycle
2 3 4

5 6
lecture 7

ergodic hypothesis, statisitcal ensembles, density matrix, Liouville's theorem, microcanonical ensemble, density of states

HW #1 due
7 8
lecture canceled
9 10 11

12 13
lecture 8

density of states and connection to entropy, entropy of the ideal gas and problem of extensivity, entropy of mixing and Gibbs' paradox
14 15
lecture 9

entropy of mixing continued, indistinguishable particles, the canonical ensemble and the canonical partition function
16 17
lecture 10

Helholtz free energy and the canonical partition function, energy fluctuations, equivalence of canonical and microcanonical ensembles in the thermodynamic limit

make up lecture, starts 11 am
18

19 20
lecture 11

average energy vs most probably energy, Stirling's formula, factoring the canonical partition function for non-interacting objects, Maxwell velocity distribution revisited
21 22
lecture 12

virial theorm, equipartition theorem, elastic vibrations of a solid and the law of Dulong and Petit, paramagnetism of classical spins and the Curie law of paramagnetic susceptibility

HW #2 due
23 24 25

26 27
class canceled
28 29
class canceled