COURSE LAYOUT
Week 1: Review of thermodynamics, Hamiltonian mechanics of classical and quantum systems.
Week 2: Microcanonical ensemble and the concept of entropy. Examples of systems with finite and
infinitely many degrees of freedom. Counting of states and entropy in quantum systems.
Week 3: Canonical ensemble and the concept of temperature. Relation between canonical and microcanonical
ensembles and partition functions. Thermodynamic potentials and Legendre transformations. Examples
from classical and quantum systems.
Week 4: Other ensembles and their related thermodynamic potentials Concept of fugacity, pressure of an ideal gas.
Equation of state of an ideal classical gas.
Week 5: Equation of state of ideal Bose and Fermi gases. Bose Einstein condensation and Fermi degeneracy pressure.
Week 6: Non-ideal gas: Van der Waals equation of state. Concept of phase diagram
Week 7: Magnetic insulators: Ising model, Potts model Solution on 1D lattice using transfer matrix method. Solution in
large dimensions using mean field theory.
Week 8: Pauli paramagnetism and temperature dependent susceptibility, electronic contribution to specific heat of solids.
Deybe and Einstein theory of specific heat of solids
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