Lecture 1: Accessible States
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...
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Thermal and Statistical Physics
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...
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20 of 30 episodesNew Course: Solid State Physics
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...
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Final Review 2
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...
Final Review 1
This is a final review for the first 3/4 of the course. Lecture Audio
Lecture 24: Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem
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...
Lecture23: Brownian Motion and Diffusion
Brownian motion was discovered by a botanist named Brown, when he looked at water under a microscope, and observed pollen grains "jiggling"...
Lecture 22: Nucleation in First Order (Abrupt) Phase Transitions
Supercooling Demonstration (thanks to special guest Prof. Ken Ritchie ): Put filtered water in a plastic bottle in your freezer for, say, 4...
Lecture 21: Alloys, Mixing, and Phase Separation
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...
Lecture 20: Landau Theory of Phase Transitions; Oil, Water, and Alloys
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....
Lecture 19: Symmetries, Order Parameters, and the Failure of Reductionism
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,...
Lecture 18: Van Der Waals and Geckos
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...
Lecture 17: Introduction to Phase Transitions
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...
Lecture 16: Gibbs Free Energy and Chemical Reactions
We define the Gibbs Free Energy, which is the right energy function to use when you can control temperature, pressure, and particle number....
Lecture 15: Refrigerators and Path Dependence of Work
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...
Midterm Exam
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...
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Midterm Review
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...
Lecture 14: Engines
Storytime with Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde), and her Uncle Mycroft's entropy-detecting entroposcope. Why are large-scale systems capable of...
Lecture 13: Bose Condensates
More about Bose condensates. They're really weird -- at the lowest temperature, all bosons flock to the lowest available state, producing a...
Lecture 12: Reversible and Irreversible Expansions
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...
Lecture 11: Bose Gas and Ideal Gas
Review of Fermions and Bosons. Review of Fermi Gas. All about the Bose gas, and its ditsrubution function. In the classical limit, the Fermi...