Advanced Statistical Mechanics
As mentioned, I will be giving a different course starting spring 2011: Advanced Statistical Mechanics. Today I have made some decisions concerning the structure. One of the goals is to provide backward compatibility with the course of Jos Thijssen sucsessfully given for a number of years.
Book: I decided to go for most popular books for a course of the kind: those of Mehrar Kardar. This was not a simple decision since the books are thick, written in a more scolastic style than I’d like, provide the coverage that is more broad than interesting, and cost seventy-nine silver pounds. Many teachers that use the books complain about inconventional notations. Still the books are adopted in most prestigious American universities. So finally I got in terms with those.
Topics: since the books are too thick, one has to make a selection of topics. The present selection of Jos Thijssen is very logical and will be taken as a basis. However, owing to unavoidable taste differences I’d rather resize the relative volume of the topics. For instance, I’d like very much to talk about the correspondence between classical 1d stat-mechanics and 0d quantum mechanics, while ideal gases do not appeal to me that much.