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Lecture Notes on Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics (Physics 211)

Lecture Notes on Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics (Physics 211)#

UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA, BERKELEY DEPARTMENT OF PHYSICS

Instructor: Prof. Oskar Hallatschek (he/his), Office: 408D Stanley Hall, Email: ohallats@berkeley.edu

The following lecture notes are designed to complement the Berkeley Physics course 211 material covered in the spring of 2025. Special thanks to Mike Zalatel and Dunghai Lee for their invaluable lecture notes, which have partially influenced my own.

The course structure is adapted and reordered from Kardar’s textbook.

  • Probability & information entropy

    • Kardar 2, Arovas 1

  • Fundamentals of thermodynamics via molecular perspective - ensemble theory

    • Kardar 4, Arovas 4

  • Non-equilibrium Fluctuation theorems

    • lecture notes

  • Dynamics of interacting particles

    • Kardar 5, Arovas 6

  • Monte Carlo, Debye-Hueckel, Diffusion

    • lecture notes

  • Study of Hamiltonian dynamics and ergodicity

    • Arovas 3, Kardar 3.1, 3.2

  • Quantum statistical mechanics

    • Kardar 6+7, Arovas 5

  • Exploration of mean field and Landau theory

    • Arovas 7

Important Notes:

  • Undergraduate level thermodynamics, a prerequisite for this course, will not be covered. Students are encouraged to review this material independently if needed.

  • A brief overview of probabilistic reasoning will be provided (in class and discussions); however, extensive time cannot be dedicated to this. Students are advised to actively revise these concepts on their own. (Kardar 2!!)

  • The syllabus is subject to modifications, aiming to incorporate modern topics relevant to current research in active matter, (quantum) information theory, and machine learning.

Syllabus Updates: The syllabus will be updated throughout the course.