Instructor:  Todd Gingrich

Office:  Ryan 4018

Office Hours:   Thursdays 1 pm, Tech L221

Telephone:  847-491-4048

Email:  todd.gingrich@northwestern.edu

Lecture:  Tech L221

Time:  MTuWF 1-1:50pm

Textbook:   Ian Ford, Statistical Physics: An Entropic Approach.

Midterm Exam:  Friday, May 24, 1 pm, Tech L221.

The course syllabus contains additional information about notes, evaluations, collaboration, programming assignments, and a course outline.

The course website (this site) will be used to post lecture notes, special notes, homework assignments, and homework solutions.

Lecture notes:

• Friday, May 3, 2019: Introduction to the course, steady states of dynamical systems, macroscopic versus microscopic measurements. [Notes]
  
• Tuesday, May 7, 2019: Microstates and macrostates, chaotic motivation for probabilistic treatement of microstates, relaxation to stationary state (of a Markov dynamics, not Hamiltonian dynamics). [Notes] [Mathematica demo] (which would require this package to run)
  
• Wednesday, May 8, 2019: Basic probability recap, equal a priori weights. [Notes]
  
• Friday, May 10, 2019: Random walks, Boltzmann entropy. [Notes]
  
• Monday, May 13, 2019: Random walk variance, Central Limit Theorem. [Notes]
  
• Tuesday, May 14, 2019: From equal a priori weights to the Boltzmann distribution. [Notes]
  
• Wednesday, May 15, 2019: Connecting beta with thermodynamic notions of temperature. [Notes]
  
• Thursday, May 16, 2019: Energy fluctuations, generating functions, and heat capacity. [Notes]
  
• Friday, May 17, 2019: Helmholtz free energy and the canonical partition function. [Notes]
  
• Monday, May 20, 2019: Office Hours, homework discussion.
  
• Tuesday, May 21, 2019: Cleaned up the thermodynamic limit and the connection between free energies and partition functions. [Notes]
  
• Wednesday, May 22, 2019: Free energy and reversible work. [Notes]
  
• Thursday, May 23, 2019: The reversible work theorem, irreversible work, and dissipation. [Notes]
  
• Friday, May 24, 2019: Exam.
  
• Tuesday, May 28, 2019: Potentials of mean force are not generators of dynamics, rates and stochastic treatment of two-state chemical isomerization kinetics. [Notes]
  
• Wednesday, May 29, 2019: Transition states, three-state kinetics with a rare intermediate. [Notes]
  
• Thursday, May 30, 2019: Office Hours, homework discussion.
  
• Friday, May 31, 2019: Diffusion. [Notes]
  
• Monday, June 3, 2019: Velocity autocorrelations, statistical independence of subsequent chunks of time yields diffusion. [Notes]
  
• Tuesday, June 4, 2019: Nonequilibrium work relations. [Notes]
  
• Thursday, June 6, 2019: Phase transitions and the Ising model. [Notes]
  
• Friday, June 7, 2019: Markov chain Monte Carlo or how to use a computer to calculate free energies. [Notes]
  
• Monday, June 10, 2019: Exam.
  

Homework assignments will normally be made available on this website one week before they are due. Late work will only be accepted if arrangements are made in advance or if there are particularly exceptional circumstances. 

• Problem Set 1, due Tuesday, May 14 at 1 pm [Mathematica Notebook] [Solution]
  
• Problem Set 2, due Tuesday, May 21 at 1 pm [Solution]
  
• Problem Set 3, due Friday, May 31 at 1 pm [Solution]
  
• Problem Set 4, due Monday, June 3 at 1 pm [Solution]