PHYS 203 Thermal Physics I Syllabus

For the second term of 2021-22 academic year (aka 2021W), section 201.

Calendar Description

Fundamentals of thermodynamics and statistical physics; entropy, laws of thermodynamics, heat engines, free energy, phase transitions, Boltzmann statistics, quantum statistics.

This course is eligible for Credit/D/Fail grading. To determine whether you can take this course for Credit/D/Fail grading, visit the Credit/D/Fail website. You must register in the course before you can select the Credit/D/Fail grading option.

Credits: 4

Pre-reqs: One of PHYS 102, PHYS 108, PHYS 118, PHYS 158, PHYS 153, SCIE 001.

Co-reqs: One of MATH 217, MATH 200, MATH 226, MATH 253, MATH 263.

Instructors

Professor: Joanna Karczmarek

Office: Hennings 400
Office Phone: 604-822-2929
Email: joanna AT phas.ubc.ca (best way to get in touch)
To ask questions about course material, please use Piazza
My Homepage
PHYS 203 Office Hours: on Zoom, Monday 3:30-4:30pm (see Canvas for links). When needed, ad hoc office hours will be scheduled and announced.

Teaching Assistants (TAs): Su Yu Ding and Laya Ghodsi

Learning sources and References

Suggested Textbook: "Thermal Physics" by Daniel V. Schroeder.

Any undergraduate textbook on thermodynamics and/or statistics can be used as an additional learning source. Your first year physics textbook might be a great place to start!

Additional online learning sources will be linked from the course content table.

Delivery mode

This course, while scheduled as an in-person course, will be online for a portion of the term, including assessments. We will start in-person meetings on a date yet to be determined by the University. At the very earliest, this will be Jan 24th. When we resume in-person activities, we will meet in our scheduled classroom space on campus (Henn 200). For meetings prior to that time, we will have synchronous Zoom-based lectures during the normally scheduled time (Tue and Thu, 9-11am). The Zoom links will be available on Canvas.

Grading scheme and policies

Participation in class is expected. Material might be covered that is not available anywhere else. In-class worksheets and clicker questions will be used extensively. If you miss a lecture, please catch up before the next one. Lectures recordings (if any) will be posted as soon as they are available. Participation grades will be awarded, including during on-line lectures.

Together with lecture material, Weekly Practice assignments are designed to prepare you for the typical questions on tests and the final exam.

Participation	5%	Lecture participation will be assessed through either clicker question participation or worksheets. You will not be graded on correctness for this portion of your grade. The participation grade will be scaled so that obtaining 80% of the points will result in a full 5/5 grade for this component. This should be sufficient to offer accomodations for occasional unavoidable absenses. Further accomodations for excused absences will be made only for prolonged absenses (longer than 1 week). If you cannot come to lecture: The 'lecture notes' link will contain slides ahead of the lecture, including clicker questions. If you are unable to attend in person, you can email me your answers to the clicker questions before the lecture ends to get the associated credit. Worksheets will be due in the afternoon after the lecture, and you will be able to hand them in via a Canvas upload if you so desire. Worksheets will typically be posted the day/evening before the lecture.
Homework	20%	The Homework is divided into two components: Weekly Practice (16%) and Problem Sets (4%). The Weekly Practice assignments will be due every Tuesday, and will give you an opportunity to apply concepts learned in Lectures. The assignments will be through WebWork. You will be given multiple chances to get correct answers. Two lowest Weekly Practice scores will be dropped when computing your final grade. All Weekly Practice assignments carry equal weight, independent of the number of questions on each. Problem Sets will contain longer and more involved problem, and you will hand in detailed solutions. The questions on Problem Sets are not desiged as test preparation, and they might extend the course material. You might find the Problem Sets very time consuming; in that case, you are likely to obtain a higher grade in the course if you use your time to prepare for the tests and exam. Group discussion of these assignments is encouraged, but you must yourself obtain the answers you enter online and/or hand in. While working with other students, you may share your thinking. You may not make your answers or solutions available to others, or ask others to make their answers or solutions available to you. You may also not post WebWork or Problem Set questions anywhere online (forums, homework help websites, etc...).
Tests and Final exam	75%	Tests will be administered during regular class time. If on-line, a test will be open book, timed and require a Canvas file upload for the problem portion. You will be asked to sign an integrity pledge, and we will proctor using Zoom. If in-person, the tests will be closed book. Each test's weight is one unit, and the final exam will be three units. There will be therefore 6 units available. The lowest unit will be dropped, and the remaining five units will be 15% of the course grade each. Another way to explain the above scheme: each test is worth 15% of the final grade; the exam is worth 30% of the final grade; additionally, the exam grade will be used to replace your lowest test grade if it is higher than that grade. If a scheduled test/exam falls on one of your religious holidays, please let me know as soon as possible so that I can make alternative arrangements. A notice of at least two weeks is required.

Deadlines and Test dates

The three tests will be held in class, on February 3, March 1 and March 24.

Weekly Practice assignments are due every Tuesday.

Course outline

The outline below should help give you the big picture of what we'll discuss in the course. You may want to refer back to this during the course to see how the current topic fits into the big picture, and also see where we're going. Some of the descriptions will probably make more sense after we have begun discussing that topic.

PART IA: Preliminaries, Statistical Mechanics

We will start with an understanding of fluctuations in large random systems. We will then discuss the Fundamental Assumption of Statistical Mechanics, the zeroth law of Thermodynamics, and the difference between systems with fixed energy and fixed temperature. We will derive the Boltzmann factor, define the partition function and learn how to compute the energy stored in a system given its temperature. We will also learn how to construct partition functions for large systems from the partition functions of their components.

PART IB: Fundamentals of Thermodynamics

We will start by carefully introducing the basic concepts of thermal physics: thermal equilibrium, temperature and heat. We will state the first law of Thermodynamics, and examine the conceptual differences and connections between energy, heat and work. We will derive properties (equation of state and internal energy) of ideal gas, then use those to study compression work under varying conditions. We will discuss changes in ideal gas under different conditions: constant temperature, constant volume, constant pressure and adiabatic. As an application, we will learn how to compute the efficiency of a heat engine.

PART IC: Putting Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics together

We will introduce the concept of entropy, and tie it with the second law of thermodynamics. We will discuss temperature, pressure and chemical potential in terms of entropy, and introduce the fundamental identity of thermodynamics. We will discuss reversible and irreversible processes, mixing and identical particles. We will also revisit Boltzman factors and the partition function. Together, we should have a complete picture of how classical thermodynamics arises out of Statistical Mechanics.

PART II: Thermodynamics

In this part of the course, we will learn more thermodynamics and apply it to real life systems. We will discuss a variety of thermodynamical concepts such as free energy, Gibbs free energy, maxwell identities and chemical equilibrium. Using these, we will undestand phases of matter and phase transformations. Then, we will discuss heat engines and refrigerators: thermal systems that run in a cycle. We will discuss theoretical limits on the efficiency of such cyclical processes and study the internal combustion engine, the steam engine and real refrigerators.

PART III: Statistical Mechanics

In the third part of the course, we will return to the microscopic point of view. We will link the central concept of a partition function to free energy. We will then derive results for several important classical and quantum mechanical systems: we will prove the equipartition theorem, derive the ideal gas law and study the heat capacity of solids. We will then allow the number of particles in a system to vary and introduce the Fermi-Dirac and the Bose-Einstein distributions. As applications, we will derive the blackbody spectrum, and examine quantum gases, including electrons in a metal and Bose-Einstein condensation. In the process, we will become comfortable with the tools of statistical mechanics and learn how to extract macroscopic thermodynamic data from a microscopic description.

Possible Special Lectures

The Thermodynamics of Black Holes
Shannon Information Theory
Non-Equilibrium Thermodynamics

Learning Goals

The broad learning outcomes of the course are: a conceptual understanding of thermal physics, and the ability to apply this understanding to solve problems in a large variety of theoretical and real-life systems. In particular, you should:

develop an understanding of the the basic concepts of thermodynamics (temperature, heat, entropy, free energy, etc...) and of the laws that govern them;
develop an appreciation of the universality of the laws of thermodynamics;
understand and be able to analyze qualitatively a variety of real life applications of thermodynamics, from phase transitions to engines, refrigerators and batteries;
understand the interplay of thermodynamics and statistical mechanics: how the universal laws of thermodynamics arise from stat mech via the connection between disorder and entropy;
understand and be able to apply to a new system the basic machinery of statistical mechanics (how to sum over all states with the appropriate weighting, and how to extract thermodynamic quantities from a stat mech calculation);
be able to analyze several classical and quantum statistical systems (ideal gas, Einstein solid, paramagnet, black body radiation, Fermi gas) and understand their role in real life applications.

This course is also designed to improve many 'soft skills'. You will practice:

fitting newly gained information into a growing framework of understanding,
connecting conceptual understanding with quantitative (mathematical) expressions (equations),
reflecting on your learning and how it relates beyond this course: math courses, other physics courses, your understanding of how the universe works.

UBC provides resources to support student learning and to maintain healthy lifestyles but recognizes that sometimes crises arise and so there are additional resources to access including those for survivors of sexual violence. UBC values respect for the person and ideas of all members of the academic community. Harassment and discrimination are not tolerated nor is suppression of academic freedom. UBC provides appropriate accommodation for students with disabilities and for religious, spiritual and cultural observances. UBC values academic honesty and students ae expected to acknowledge the ideas generated by others and to uphold the highest academic standards in all of their actions. Details of the policies and how to access support are available here.

UBC takes academic misconduct (this includes copying of homework, cheating on exams and plagiarism) very seriously, and the penalties are stiff. See sections on Academic Honesty and Standards and Academic Misconduct in the UBC Academic Calendar.

During this pandemic, the shift to online learning has greatly altered teaching and studying at UBC, including changes to health and safety considerations. Keep in mind that some UBC courses might cover topics that are censored or considered illegal by non-Canadian governments. This may include, but is not limited to, human rights, representative government, defamation, obscenity, gender or sexuality, and historical or current geopolitical controversies. If you are a student living abroad, you will be subject to the laws of your local jurisdiction, and your local authorities might limit your access to course material or take punitive action against you. UBC is strongly committed to academic freedom, but has no control over foreign authorities (please visit http://www.calendar.ubc.ca/vancouver/index.cfm?tree=3,33,86,0 for an articulation of the values of the University conveyed in the Senate Statement on Academic Freedom). Thus, we recognize that students will have legitimate reason to exercise caution in studying certain subjects. If you have concerns regarding your personal situation, consider postponing taking a course with manifest risks, until you are back on campus or reach out to your academic advisor to find substitute courses. For further information and support, please visit: http://academic.ubc.ca/support-resources/freedom-expression.

Copyright notice: all material in this course is copyrighted by Joanna Karczmarek (the instructor). It is provided online to you, the students registered in the course. You may not post, share or publish any of the course materials without explicit permission from the instructor (Joanna Karczmarek). This applies even to those portions of the course materials that are shared with the public by the instructor or other authorized agents. Moreover, sharing exam, test and/or quiz questions, or solutions to any questions posed in the course (including those in worsheets, homework, quizzes, tests, exams and any practice materials) might constitute academic misconduct.