Physics 140A

Syllabus

Chapter and section references are to Thermal Physics, by Ralph Baierlein.

Week 1: Chapter 1 - first law, temperature, ideal gas (kinetic derivation of ideal gas law), heat and work, heat capacity.
Week 2: Chapter 2 - macrostates vs microstates, counting microstates, second law, entropy, relation between entropy and heating.
Week 3: Chapter 4 - More on counting microstates, density of states. Chapter 3 - Carnot cycle, efficiency, thermodynamic road to entropy and temperature, Otto cycle (as time permits).
Week 4-5: Chapter 5 - Probabilities, canonical ensemble, partition function, application to two level system, ideal gas in semiclassical approximation. Midterm uses one session of Week 5.
Week 6: Chapter 13 - The classical version of the ideal gas discussion, Maxwell distribution of velocities, equipartition, ideal gas in a slowly varying external potential. Omit heat capacity of a diatomic molecule 13.4. Part of one session devoted to discussion of the midterm exam.
Week 7: Chapter 7 - Chemical potential, Helmholtz free energy.
Week 8: Chapter 12 - Phase equilibrium.
Week 9-10: Chapters 6 & 8 - Fermions and bosons, application to blackbody radiation. Black bodies and gray bodies, emissivity and absorptivity, etc. Defer discussion of the Debye model (chapter 6) to 140B.