- Review of Thermodynamics: 0th, 1st, 2nd laws, Entropy, TdS relationships, Carnot cycle, Legendre transform and thermodynamic potentials, Gibbs phase rules, Gibbs free energy and phase
transitions.
- Statistical Mechanics: Introduction -- the need for a Statistical approach to thermodynamics.
- Random processes. Coin tossing and the drunkard's walk. Binomial distribution. Stirling's approximation for the factorial. The normal distribution.
- Boltzmann's hypothesis S = k logW . Application to a system of non-interacting spins.
- Identical particles and indistinguishability. Counting of distributions for noninteracting
distinguishable and indistinguishable particles, Derivation of the Maxwell-Boltzmann, Fermi-Dirac
and Bose-Einstein statistics.
- Simple Applications of MB, FD and BE statistics.
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