Statistical Physics

Michael Cross, Caltech: Physics 127b

The second term discusses using statistical mechanics to understand real systems, rather than ideal systems that can be solved exactly. In addition dynamics and fluctuations will be considered. These notes are not intended to be a complete account of the class discussion, but attempt to summarize the main points.

Lecture 1: Classical Nonideal Gas
Lecture 2: Dense Gases and the Liquid State
Lecture 3: First Order Phase Transitions
Lecture 4: Phase Transitions in Multicomponent Systems
Lecture 5: Second Order Phase Transitions
Lecture 6: Landau Theory
Lecture 7: Fluctuations
Lecture 8: Scaling
Lecture 9: RNG: 1D Ising Model
Lecture 10: RNG: General Case
Lecture 11: RNG: Advanced Topics
Lecture 12: Kinetic Theory
Lecture 13: Boltzmann Equation I: Scattering off Impurities
Lecture 14: Boltzmann Equation II: Binary Scattering
Lecture 15: Brownian Motion
Lecture 16: Langevin Equation
Lecture 17: Fokker-Planck Equation
Lecture 18: Linear Response Theory, etc.
Lecture 19: You can find information on LIGO at the LIGO Home page, particularly in the sidebar on the left. For example the talk by Rainer Weiss gives a good general overview, and his last slide has recent noise performance curves.

All files are in Acrobat (pdf) format

Last modified: 6 October, 2006
Michael Cross