Friday, April 24, 2009
20 key concepts in thermodynamics and condensed matter
I have just finished revising my lecture for monday 9 a.m. I will mostly review my slant on 11 key ideas from thermodynamics. I will then just flag 9 key ideas that I hope I will be able to teach the students during the next 6 weeks (13 lectures, 4 tutorials). Any feedback is welcome.
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Characteristics of static disorder can emerge from electron-phonon interactions
Electronic systems with large amounts of static disorder can exhibit distinct properties, including localisation of electronic states and su...
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Is it something to do with breakdown of the Born-Oppenheimer approximation? In molecular spectroscopy you occasionally hear this term thro... -
I welcome discussion on this point. I don't think it is as sensitive or as important a topic as the author order on papers. With rega...
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If you look on the arXiv and in Nature journals there is a continuing stream of people claiming to observe superconductivity in some new mat...
Related to concept 10 (free energy), I think that a key concept in the practical application of thermodynamics is the idea that "the entropy of the universe tends toward a maximum" is equivalent to "the Gibbs free energy of the system (at constant T and P) tends toward a minimum" and the corresponding statement about Helmholtz free energy. This allows one to use just the state properties of the system to determine the direction of change and equilibrium conditions, rather than having to worry about the entire universe!
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