February

February

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Sunday Monday Tuesday Wednesday Thursday Friday Saturday

1

2 3
lecture 4

Helmholtz and Gibbs free energies, enthalpy, the grand potential, reservoirs, extremum principles for free energies, Maxwell relations
4 5
lecture 5

Response functions and relations between them, stability constraints on response functions
6 7 8

9 10
lecture 6

Curvature of free energies and stability requirements for response functions, heat engines, thermodynamic efficiency, Carnot cycle
11 12
lecture 7

Kinetic theory of ideal gas, Maxwell velocity distribution, Ergodic hypothesis, statisitcal ensembles, density matrix
13 14
HW #1 due
15

16 17
lecture 8

Liouville's theorem, microcanonical ensemble, density of states and connection to entropy
18 19
lecture 9

Entropy of the ideal gas and problem of extensivity, entropy of mixing and Gibbs paradox, indistinguishable particles

make-up lecture 9am BL 270

lecture 10

The canonical ensemble and the canonical partition function, Helholtz free energy and the canonical partition function, energy fluctuations, equivalence of canonical and microcanonical ensembles in the thermodynamic limit
20 21 22

23 24
lecture 11

Average energy vs most probably energy, Stirling's formula, factoring the canonical partition function for non-interacting objects, the ideal gas in the canonical ensemble, Maxwell velocity distribution revisited

HW #2 due
25 26
lecture 12

The virial theorm, the 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

make-up lecture 9am BL 270

lecture 13

A note about the proper choice of coordinates, the grand canonical ensemble and partition function
27 28 29