Part 1 - Overview of Fundamental Principles in Statistical Mechanics

This lecture starts with a reminder of basic concepts and key equations of classical thermodynamics, and subsequently introduces the general and powerful framework of statistical mechanics. We discuss the concepts of microstates, Hamiltonian, as well as averaging towards macroscopically observable quantities. We finally explain what ensembles are, and introduce three commonly used ones: the microcanonical, the canonical and the grand-canonical ensembles.

Lecture slides in pdf format (opens in a new window).

 

 

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