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Physics 416 Thermal and Statistical Physics Purdue University Textbook: Thermal Physics by Kittel and Kroemer Lectures follow the text fairly closely, so if you're joining us from iTunes, yo...
It's a new year, with new lectures. Today is an introduction to Thermal and Statistical Physics. We do a lightning-fast review of quantum me...
Prof. Carlson is teaching a new course this semester, entitled Solid State Physics. Here is a taste of the new course, which has a separate...
This is a final review for the last 1/4 of the course. This is a very short lecture, because we had a field trip to go see the prestigious B...
This is a final review for the first 3/4 of the course. Lecture Audio
We finish two more examples of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem. This is a theorem that pops up everywhere! It means that the very same m...
Brownian motion was discovered by a botanist named Brown, when he looked at water under a microscope, and observed pollen grains "jiggling"...
Supercooling Demonstration (thanks to special guest Prof. Ken Ritchie ): Put filtered water in a plastic bottle in your freezer for, say, 4...
Oil and water -- they don't mix. Or do they? Due to the entropy of mixing, any tiny amount of impurity is highly favored entropically. This...
Now that we know what order parameters are (see last lecture), we'll use the order parameter of a phase to construct the Landau free energy....
We finish the van der Waals equation of state, and use it to illustrate the liquid-gas phase transition. It turns out that at low pressure,...
We derive the shape of the phase boundary for solid to gas transitions (sublimation), examples being dry ice (CO2) or ice at low pressure. W...
We finish discussing chemical reactions, including how fast they progress, and what a catalyst can do for you. Then we begin a new topic: ph...
We define the Gibbs Free Energy, which is the right energy function to use when you can control temperature, pressure, and particle number....
How refrigerators work. Why you can't cool your apartment by leaving the refrigerator door open. How heat and work depend on which path is t...
We had an exam Wednesday covering chapters 1-7. In the mean time, the podcasting story (which partly featured our class) was in the Chicago...
We're having a midterm exam Wednesday, and today is a review of everything in chapters 1-7 in the text, Kittel and Kroemer's Thermal Physics...
Storytime with Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde), and her Uncle Mycroft's entropy-detecting entroposcope. Why are large-scale systems capable of...
More about Bose condensates. They're really weird -- at the lowest temperature, all bosons flock to the lowest available state, producing a...
Now that we've derived absolutely everything about the ideal gas from scratch, it's time to do something useful with it! We'd like to eventu...
Review of Fermions and Bosons. Review of Fermi Gas. All about the Bose gas, and its ditsrubution function. In the classical limit, the Fermi...
Why no two pieces of matter may occupy the same space at the same time. Fermions are antisocial; bosons are social. Bosonic examples: lasers...
When the system and reservoir can trade particles, you can't use the Boltzmann factor and the partition function anymore. Instead, use the G...
Introducing a new thermodynamically conjugate pair of variables: number of particles and chemical potential. Internal and external chemical...
Deriving Planck's law of blackbody radiation. How to use it to tell the temperature of a star. Discussions about stars -- absorption lines a...
Deriving the ideal gas law. Equipartition Theorem. Entropy of Mixing. Hot things glow -- or how night vision goggles work (Planck blackbody...
Helmholtz Free Energy is the right energy to use when temperature and volume are used as control variables. Free Energy and the Partition Fu...
Boltzmann Factor, Partition Function and how to calculate everything else from it. Live near lakes because they have a high heat capacity. E...
Fundamental assumption of statistical mechanics: all accessible states are equally likely. Ensemble averages are weighted averages. Two syst...
Why is the most probable configuration important? Multiplicity Function is a gaussian in the two-state system. Weighted averages. Introducti...
Lightning fast review of quantum mechanics. Stationary quantum states, accessible states, fundamental assumptions of statistical mechanics....