Home - Statistical Mechanics background (work in progress!) - Up

 

1. Introduction

These notes are written for my PhD student, who is a Mathematician who needs to know a little Statistical Mechanics for his thesis introduction. YMMV. He has asked:

 

What is Statistical Mechanics? Who is interested in it?
What is the relationship between the partition function and Observables?

 

...let's start with those questions.

 

1.1. What? Why? (Click Me)

 

1.2. Classical reminders (Click Me)

 

1.3. Stats/Gibbs canonical distribution (Click Me)

 

1.4. Partition Function (Click Me)

 

1.5. The Potts Model (Click Me)

 

1.6. Physics in the partition function (Click Me)

 


 

\@ Paul Martin 2008, 2009