The course will deal with quantities such as energy, entropy, free energy, heat capacity, equilibrium constants and rate constants, with the focus on polyatomic molecules as well as some discussion of metals, Bose-Einstein condensates and vibrations in crystals.
[1] Thermodynamics, Fundamentals (first and second law of thermodynamics, variational statement of the second law, Legendre transforms, Maxwell relations, Gibbs-Duhem equation).
[2] Conditions for Equilibrium and Stability (multiphase and multicomponent equilibrium, the chemical potential, the Gibbs phase rule)
[3] Statistical Mechanics (the connection between microscopic (statistical mechanics) and macroscopic (thermodynamics), microcanonical and canonical ensembles, partition functions, fluctuations, variational development of equilibrium distribution functions, the Gibbs entropy formula)
[4] Non-Interacting (Ideal) Systems. I. (canonical partition functions for translation, rotation and vibration in molecules, the heat capacity, the equilibrium constant and the rate constant)
[5] Non-Interacting (ideal) Systems. II. (Bose and Fermi statistics, photon gas, phonons, electrons in metals, Bose-Einstein condensation)
[6] Statistical Mechanical Theory of Phase Transitions (Ising model, lattice gas, mean field theory, renormalization group theory).