Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics with Laboratory I

CHEM C223A - Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics with Laboratory I

<p>Lecture, two and one half hours; discussion, one hour; laboratory, 90 minutes. Requisites: courses 110A, 110B or 156, 113A, Mathematics 33A, with grades of C– or better. Rigorous presentation of fundamentals of classical thermodynamics. Principles of statistical thermodynamics: probability, ensembles, partition functions, independent molecules, and perfect gas. Applications of classical and statistical thermodynamics selected from diatomic and polyatomic gases, solid and fluid states, phase equilibria, electric and magnetic effects, ortho-para hydrogen, chemical equilibria, reaction rates, imperfect gas, nonelectrolyte and electrolyte solutions, surface phenomena, high polymers, gravitation. May be concurrently scheduled with course C223A. Letter grading.</p>

Chemistry and Biochemistry

College of Letters and Science

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CHEM C123A - Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics with Laboratory I

Understand how to treat interacting systems at the microscopic level, phase transitions.  


Understand how to choose a representation and represent thermodynamic information in different representations


learn to apply Runge-Kutta and other algorithms in the  scipy.integrate.solve_ivp package to solve ODEs


integrate random numbers into a simple system to assign particle velocities from a Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution


understand quasi-random numbers, Box-Mueller transformation for Gaussian random numbers and convergence statistics with sampling


Understand fundamental thermodyanmic relations      

perform linear and non-linear fits to thermodynamic and  statistical mechanical data using scipy.optimize


calculate equilibrium constants from partition functions.

Understand the workings of Monte Carlo simulations and how they reproduce equilibrium statistics


Understand central limit theorem and connection to second derivative quantities such as  heat capacity and compressibility.


Understand how both system size and temperature 
                                  control the phase transition in the 2-D Ising magnet


Understand how to connect thermodynamic quantities with molecular partition functions; understand the 
connection between T and the Boltzmann distribution.   


General Catalog

Advanced Thermodynamics and Statistical Mechanics with Laboratory I

CHEM C123A

4 units