Principles of Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics
Published on 5. September 2000
Book
Hardback
XXVI, 538 pages
978-3-527-40300-4 (ISBN)
Description
This textbook provides a complete survey of the broad field of statistical mechanics. Based on existing lectures, it stresses a special pedagogical approach to this topic. The authors clearly distinguish between general principles and their applications in problem solving. Analogies between phase transitions in fluids and magnets using continuum and spin models are emphasized. This book has special features like historical notes, summaries, problems, mathematical appendix, computer programs and order of magnitude estimations. Due to its extensive list of references for technical details on advanced topics, this book is for students and also for researchers in the field of condensed matter physics, materials science, polymer science, solid state physics, and astrophysics.
More details
Content
Part I Thermostatics: basic principles of thermostatics; thermostatics of phase stability, phase equilibria and phase transitions. Part II Basic principles of statistical mechanics: rules of calculation; fluctuations, correlation and response functions; statistical physics of ideal classical gases; statistical physics of ideal quantum gases. Part III Statistical mechanics of interacting systems: models of interacting systems and thermodynamic limit; exact solution of some models of interacting systems; computer simulation methods in statistical mechanics; mean-field approximation I - Van der Waals-Weiss formulation; exact solution of models with infinite-range interaction or in infinite dimension; mean-field approximation II - Landau formulation; beyond mean-field approximation - scaling and renormalization group; rules of calculation revisited - foundations of statistical mechanics. (Part contents).