Basic Statistical Mechanics
NPTEL is offering online course for undergraduate/ postgraduate students in Basic Statistical Mechanics.
About the course:
- In order to understand natural phenomena like phase transitions or nucleation or many biological reactions like protein folding, enzyme kinetics, we need to understand how many particles interact and behave together in certain specified manner.
- For example, ice melts at 00 C and water boils at 1000 C, at low temperature the rain drops form in the upper atmosphere.
- Enzyme beta-galactosidase allows the breaking of the C-O bond that leads to the digestion of lactose.
- These are complex processes which involve many particles to behave in a collective fashion.
- This could happen because of the interaction among particles.
- However, these cannot be solved by Newton’s equations, because we cannot solve Newton’s equations even for three particles interacting system.
Course Layout:
- Week 1: Preliminaries: Objectives of Statistical Mechanics (SM), probability and statistics
- Week 2: Probability and Statistics, Fundamental concepts of SM
- Week 3: Phase Space and Trajectories, postulates
- Week 4: Postulates of Statistical Mechanics, Microcanonical ensemble
- Week 5: Microcanonical Ensemble, Canonical Ensembles
- Week 6: Canonical Ensemble, Grand Canonical Ensemble, isothermal-isobaric ensemble
- Week 7: Fluctuation and Response Functions, ideal monatomic gas
- Week 8: Ideal Monatomic Gas: Microscopic Expression of Translational Entropy, ideal gas of diatomic molecules
- Week 9: Ideal Gas of Diatomic molecules: Microscopic Expression of Rotational and Vibrational Entropy and Specific Heat
- Week 10: Non-ideal gas, Cluster Expansion and Mayer’s Theory
- Week 11: Mayer’s Theory for Interacting Systems: Phase Transition
- Week 12: Landau Theory of Phase Transitions: Order Parameter Expansion and Free Energy Diagrams, Nucleation
Duration: 12 weeks
Enrollment Ends: September 21, 2020
For more details, please visit: https://swayam.gov.in/nd1_noc20_cy28/preview
