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Welcome to Physics 763, a core
graduate physics course about statistical physics, which is a branch
of physics that broadly concerns trying to understand, experimentally
and theoretically, three things:
- how macroscopic properties of an equilibrium physical
system can be explained from the properties of the many microscopic
objects that make up that system.
- how macroscopic properties of equilibrium physical systems
change as some experimental thermodynamic parameter such as
temperature, pressure, volume, chemical potential, or the strength
of an external magnetic field is varied in slow small steps so that
the system is always in equilibrium. Especially interesting to
understand are phase transitions, when some macroscopic property
changes abruptly as some experimental parameter is varied in slow
small successive steps.
- statistical properties of small but still complicated objects
that interact with a large equilibrium reservoir, such as the
oxygen-carrying capability of the hemoglobin in your blood as a
function of the chemical potential of the oxygen, and how much a long
polymer like DNA in solution stretches as a constant extension force
is applied between its free ends (the so-called force-extension curve
of a polymer).
Some of the examples discussed in this course include electrons in a
metal and in a white dwarf, neutrons in a neutron star, magnetic
dipoles in a magnet, photons in blackbody radiation, neutrinos that
are part of the cosmic neutrino background, phonons in a crystal, ions
in a Bose-Einstein condensate, helium atoms in a superfluid, molecules
in a gas, transcription factors binding to DNA, and polymers in a solution.
Statistical physics is considered one of the four fundamental areas of
physics that all physics graduate students should know well, with the
other three areas being classical physics, electrodynamics, and
quantum mechanics. Statistical physics is arguably the broadest of the
four areas since the formalism works almost without change for
classical and quantum systems, and is useful for nearly all frontiers
of physics. Experimental and theoretical insights from statistical
physics have also proved to be valuable for fields outside of physics
such as as chemistry, biology, neuroscience, engineering, machine
learning, mathematics, statistics, and computer science.
Further information about Physics 763 can be found from
the course syllabus. If you have any
questions about the course, please contact the course instructor,
Professor Greenside
at hsg@phy.duke.edu.
