Sunday, April 17, 2011

Introduction to condensed matter lecture

Tomorrow for PHYS2020 Thermodynamics and Condensed Matter Physics I will give a lecture on Phase diagrams.
Hopefully, students will learn that, contrary to what they were taught in high school, there are many phases of matter, not just solid, liquid, and gas!
Furthermore, they begin to see how the Gibbs free energy is the key quantity which defines the relative stability of different phases (at fixed temperature and pressure).
The video demonstrations I use are from the Video Encyclopedia of Physics Demonstrations.

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