Introduction To Statistical Mechanics

Week 2: Microcanonical ensemble and the concept of entropy. Examples of systems with finite and 

               infinitely many degrees of freedom. Counting of states and entropy in quantum systems.

Week 3: Canonical ensemble and the concept of temperature. Relation between canonical and microcanonical

               ensembles and partition functions. Thermodynamic potentials and Legendre transformations. Examples 

               from classical and quantum systems.

Week 4: Other ensembles and their related thermodynamic potentials Concept of fugacity, pressure of an ideal gas.

               Equation of state of an ideal classical gas.

Week 7: Magnetic insulators: Ising model, Potts model Solution on 1D lattice using transfer matrix method. Solution in 

               large dimensions using mean field theory.

Week 8: Pauli paramagnetism and temperature dependent susceptibility, electronic contribution to specific heat of solids.

               Deybe and Einstein theory of specific heat of solids

Prof.Girish S. Setlur , he works in the field of Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics. He is interested in understanding and accounting for the properties of everyday bulk materials from a knowledge of the fundamental constituents of the substance and the fundamental physical laws governing those constituents. He was the inventor of a new technique called 'non-chiral bosonization' which is uniquely suited to study strongly inhomogeneous Luttinger liquids. He also invented the notion of a non-local particle hole creation operator and showed that it may be used to diagonalize interacting Fermi systems in any dimension. He is also interested in topological materials, specifically their nonlinear optical properties.