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, you might enjoy having a copy handy.
Episodes
December 12, 2005
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 Bagwell Lecture given by Purdue's very own Prof. Albert Overhauser of the world-famous Overhauser Effect.
Lecture Audio
Lecture Audio
Mark as Played
December 5, 2005
Mark as Played
December 1, 2005
We finish two more examples of the Fluctuation-Dissipation Theorem. This is a theorem that pops up everywhere! It means that the very same microscopic processes responsible for establishing thermal equilibrium are the same microscopic processes that cause resistance in metals, drag in fluids, and other types of dissipation. We discuss thermal noise in resistors (also known as Johnson noise or Nyquist noise), and demonstrate the flu...
Mark as Played
November 29, 2005
Brownian motion was discovered by a botanist named Brown, when he looked at water under a microscope, and observed pollen grains "jiggling" about in it. Einstein eventually explained it as due to the random collisions the pollen grain experienced from the water molecules. We compare the pollen grain to a drunk person walking home, and calculate how far the pollen grain can get by this type of diffusion. We also introduce the fluctu...
Mark as Played
November 16, 2005
Supercooling Demonstration (thanks to special guest Prof. Ken Ritchie): Put filtered water in a plastic bottle in your freezer for, say, 4 hours. Now, carefully remove it from the freezer, and shake the bottle vigorously. We did this, and saw ice crystals begin to slowly form in the water, because the liquid water was supercooled, and the ice phase was technically more stable. (Some crystals even resembled snowflakes, and grew...
Mark as Played
November 15, 2005
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 means that in general, you can get a small amount of a substance to mix into another. But take that too far, and they no longer mix, but "phase separate" into 2 different concentrations. We discuss this from the following perspectives: energy, entropy, and free energy. Examples: binary a...
Mark as Played
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. The Landau free energy depends on the order parameter, and retains all the symmetries of the physical system. It's amazing how much you can get from symmetry, and we're able to see how it is that a ferromagnet can have what's called a continuous phase transition. That is, starting from ze...
Mark as Played
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, the van der Waals equation of state has a wiggle where (dp/pV)>0. Since this would cause an explosion, the system instead undergoes phase separation so that part of the container has liquid, and part has gas in it.
More is different: We discuss the failure of reductionism. Reductionism is t...
More is different: We discuss the failure of reductionism. Reductionism is t...
Mark as Played
November 2, 2005
We derive the shape of the phase boundary for solid to gas transitions (sublimation), examples being dry ice (CO2) or ice at low pressure. We derive the van der Waals equation of state, which is an improvement on the ideal gas equation pV=nRT. The ideal gas equation is based on two assumptions: 1. Particles occupy zero volume, and 2. Particles do not interact. Allowing for particles to have a finite size, and also allowing for...
Mark as Played
October 31, 2005
We finish discussing chemical reactions, including how fast they progress, and what a catalyst can do for you. Then we begin a new topic: phases of matter and phase transitions between them. You've heard of solid, liquid, and gas, but did you know about the other phases of matter? Other phases include liquid crystals (of which there are many types). Also, electrons inside of a solid have their own phase transitions.
For example...
For example...
Mark as Played
October 26, 2005
We define the Gibbs Free Energy, which is the right energy function to use when you can control temperature, pressure, and particle number. This means chemists like it, because chemical reactions in a lab often take place under these conditions.
We use this to derive the Law of Mass Action, which shows that the relative concentration of reactants depends only on temperature, and apply this to dissociation of the Hydrogen molecule, ...
We use this to derive the Law of Mass Action, which shows that the relative concentration of reactants depends only on temperature, and apply this to dissociation of the Hydrogen molecule, ...
Mark as Played
October 24, 2005
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 taken. How to do completely meaningless work, the kind that's turned entirely into heat. We prove why the free energy is a useful concept: it tells you the maximum amount of work you can expect to extract from a system. The free energy is about the useful energy. We show that chemical pot...
Mark as Played
October 17, 2005
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. Topics include: Fundamental assumption of statistical mechanics, Laws of Thermodynamics, Probabilities and the Partition Function, Entropy and Temperature, Heat Capacity and Energy, Thermodynamic Identity, Helmholtz free energy, Free energy and the partition function, Maxwell Relations, Plan...
Mark as Played
October 12, 2005
Storytime with Thursday Next (Jasper Fforde), and her Uncle Mycroft's entropy-detecting entroposcope. Why are large-scale systems capable of producing irreversible processes (like glass breaking, or red and blue Kool-aid mixing), even though the microscopic processes are reversible? We finish the electronic heat capacity of metals, first with an easy estimate to see that C~T, then with the full calculation. Using ideal gas process...
Mark as Played
October 5, 2005
More about Bose condensates. They're really weird -- at the lowest temperature, all bosons flock to the lowest available state, producing a "Bose condensate".
Due to quantum mechanics, this is a remarkably stable state of matter, and is very hard to disturb. In fact, because the chemical potential becomes negative, it costs negative energy to add a new particle to the condensate. (Yes, bosons are "sticky" due to their statistic...
Due to quantum mechanics, this is a remarkably stable state of matter, and is very hard to disturb. In fact, because the chemical potential becomes negative, it costs negative energy to add a new particle to the condensate. (Yes, bosons are "sticky" due to their statistic...
Mark as Played
October 3, 2005
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 eventually learn how to use this stuff to build engines and refrigerators. Today we discuss the basic processes (reversible expansions) that are the building blocks of engines and refrigerators.
We also cover Bose condensation at the end of class, and learn why their statistics makes bosons sticky. ...
it's time to do something useful with it! We'd like to eventually learn how to use this stuff to build engines and refrigerators. Today we discuss the basic processes (reversible expansions) that are the building blocks of engines and refrigerators.
We also cover Bose condensation at the end of class, and learn why their statistics makes bosons sticky. ...
Mark as Played
September 28, 2005
Review of Fermions and Bosons. Review of Fermi Gas. All about the Bose gas, and its ditsrubution function. In the classical limit, the Fermi-Dirac distribution function and the Bose-Einstein distribution function approach the same form, and we recover ideal gas physics. We derive many properties about the ideal gas, and extend it to the case of internal degrees of freedom. More detail about the equipartition theorem, and how a...
Mark as Played
September 26, 2005
Why no two pieces of matter may occupy the same space at the same time. Fermions are antisocial; bosons are social. Bosonic examples: lasers and superfluid helium. All about Fermions. Fermions obey the Pauli exclusion principle, and each state may have either 0 or 1 fermions in it, and no more. Class Discussions: more about aluminum, what about positrons, why gecko feet are sticky. Simulation Demo: Fermi distrubution functio...
Mark as Played
September 21, 2005
When the system and reservoir can trade particles, you can't use the Boltzmann factor and the partition function anymore. Instead, use the Gibbs factor, and the grand partition function (or Gibbs sum). We introduce these new things, and then apply them to semiconductors, aluminum soft drink cans, and blood.
Lecture Audio
Lecture Audio
Mark as Played
September 19, 2005
Introducing a new thermodynamically conjugate pair of variables: number of particles and chemical potential. Internal and external chemical potential. Voltmeters measure the total chemical potential. Great class brainstorm on internal voltages in your life. How to get a theory named after yourself. Spins in a magnetic field. Why atmospheric pressure falls off with height, hiking in high altitude, and how to solve that deuter...
Mark as Played
Popular Podcasts
Daniel Jeremiah of Move the Sticks and Gregg Rosenthal of NFL Daily join forces to break down every team's needs this offseason.
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations. Follow now to get the latest episodes of Dateline NBC completely free, or subscribe to Dateline Premium for ad-free listening and exclusive bonus content: DatelinePremium.com
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Listen to 'The Bobby Bones Show' by downloading the daily full replay.
The Clay Travis and Buck Sexton Show. Clay Travis and Buck Sexton tackle the biggest stories in news, politics and current events with intelligence and humor. From the border crisis, to the madness of cancel culture and far-left missteps, Clay and Buck guide listeners through the latest headlines and hot topics with fun and entertaining conversations and opinions.