Physics 621 Home Page

Statistical Physics -- Fall 2009

Welcome to the Physics 621 home page! Please check this page regularly.

Recent changes to this page:

• Sept 23 2009 --- Welcome to the first week of class!

Contents

• Quizzes
• Problem sets
• Exams
• Feedback
• Course information

Quizzes

• Friday, Sept 26: Fill in the blanks.
• Monday, Oct 5:  Derive the heat capacity at constant volume or constant pressure for an ideal gas of molecules with f quadratic degrees of freedom.
• Monday, Oct 12:  What happens to the energies and the entropies of two systems with different temperatures that are brought into thermal contact?
  
• Monday, Oct 19:  Use the thermodynamic relation dU = T dS - P dV + mu dN to express T, P, and mu as partial derivatives.
• Monday, Oct 26:  none
• Monday, Nov 2:  For a general heat engine in which the system absorbs heat Q_hot and expels heat Q_cold, how does the entropy of each component (hot reservoir, cold reservoir, system) change at each step of a complete cycle?
• Monday Nov 9:  Suppose the temperature of a system is held fixed by keeping it in thermal contact with a heat reservoir.  Show that maximizing the total entropy is equivalent to minimizing the Helmholtz free energy of the system.
• Monday Nov 16 (rerun on Wednesday):  In the phase transition region of a liquid-gas system, there can be 3 homogenous states with different volumes that have the same pressure and temperature.  What equalities or inequalities relate the Gibbs free energies of the 3 states?   Use the thermodynamic identity for the variation dG in the Gibbs free energy to derive the Maxwell construction that determines the phase transition pressure for a given temperature.
  
• Monday Nov 23:  Given a chemical reaction at constant temperature and pressure, use the thermodynamic identity for the variation dG in the Gibbs free energy to derive the equilibrium condition in terms of the chemical potentials of the reactants.
  
• Monday Nov 30:  If a system interacts with a heat reservoir of temperature T only through the exchange of energy, show that the ratio of the probabilities of two microstates of the system is equal to the ratio of their Boltzmann factors.
  

Homework

Problem numbers are from Schroeder's Introduction to Thermal Physics.

Exams

• Midterm: Friday Oct 23, , Smith Lab 3094, 9:30am (or 8:30am if you want more time)
• Final: Tuesday, Dec 8, Smith Lab 3094, 9:30am

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Feedback

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