Physics MOC

Statistical thermodynamics MOC

Statistical thermodynamics (specifically MaxEnt thermodynamics) derives the laws for macroscopic phenomena seen in Thermodynamics MOC from the fundamental postulate that the Distribution of microstates at equilibrium is that which maximizes the Shannon entropy , and that the thermodynamic entropy .

Concepts

• Microstate and macrostate
• Shannon entropy
• Distribution of microstates at equilibrium

Ensembles

An ensemble refers to an idealized collection of virtual copies of a system representing every possible microstate the system might be in.

Ensemble	Situation	Thermodynamic variables
Microcanonical ensemble	Isolated system
Canonical ensemble	System in contact with heat reservoir
Grand canonical ensemble	System in contact with a heat and particle reservoir

Statistics

Statistics, loosely speaking, refers to the method by which one counts microstates.

• Maxwell-Boltzmann statistics
• Modified Boltzmann approximation
• Fermi-Dirac statistics
• Bose-Einstein statistics

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