Statistical Mechanics

Description

Lectures / The Department of Physics and Astronomy University of British Columbia, 2001. — 113 p.: ill.These notes contain material from lectures in two courses PHYS 303 and 455 at UBC. Sections 1–7 largely presents material given fall 1996. That year I went on to present the theory of Bose—Einstein condensation and superfluidity following closely the discussion of a book that I co-authored with Michael Plischke at Simon Fraser University. Since this material is in print I do not reproduce it here. Instead I have added a discussion of phase transitions from PHYS 455 some years earlier. Some of that material is also incorporated in the book mentioned above, but the emphasis is quite different. I have also added to section 2 some subsections on the Weibull distribution and on scale free distributions ('Pareto tail'). This material was taught in PHYS 455 but not in 303.Оглавление The historical origin of statistical mechanics Probability distributions The information theoretic approach Boltzmann statistics Ideal gases and generalizations Kinetic theory Phonons Phase transitions Some old exam questions References