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Syllabus for

 Academic year
FMI050 - Transport process in physics and biology
 
Owner: FNMAS
3,0 Credits (ECTS 4,5)
Grading: TH - Five, Four, Three, Not passed
Level: C
Department: 59 - MICROTECHNOLOGY AND NANOSCIENCE


Teaching language: English

Course module   Credit distribution   Examination dates
Sp1 Sp2 Sp3 Sp4 No Sp
0102 Examination 3,0 c Grading: TH   3,0 c   Contact examiner

In programs

TTFYA ENGINEERING PHYSICS, Year 4 (elective)
FNMAS MSc PROGRAMME IN NANOSCALE SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY, Year 1 (compulsory)

Examiner:

Professor  Vitaly Shumeiko



Eligibility:

For single subject courses within Chalmers programmes the same eligibility requirements apply, as to the programme(s) that the course is part of.

Course specific prerequisites

Thermodynamics
Statistical Physics I

Aim

Life is a non-equilibrium phenomenon. In physics, great majority of processes occur outside thermodynamic equilibrium, for example, heat conductivity or chemical reactions. How to describe many-particle system driven away from equilibrium by applied external force or evolving towards the equilibrium due to interaction with an environment? In contrast to the universality of the thermodynamics, non-equilibrium evolution is system specific and requires individual approach. The purpose of the course is to introduce basic concepts of kinetic theory and random processes theory, and to develop practical tools for investigation of statistical characteristics of non-equilibrium systems. We will discuss the origin of irreversible evolution, hierarchy of relaxation processes, transport processes, Brownian motion and fluctuations; examples will be given from physics, chemistry and biology.

Content

Time evolution of non-equilibrium distribution function and Liouville equation. Einstein theory of equilibrium fluctuations. Non-equilibrium thermodynamics and transport coefficients. Stochastic processes, joint and conditional probabilities, cumulants and characteristic function. Random walk; binomial, Gaussian and Poissonian distributions. Markov process. Master equation. Application of master equation to chemical reactions and biological processes. Examples of non-linear evolution. Boltzmann equation and time irreversibility. Scattering integrals for particle-impurity and particle-particle scattering. Local equilibrium, relaxation, and relaxation time approximation. Hydrodynamics and diffusion. Applications of Boltzmann equation in transport theory. Brownian motion; Langevin equation, and Fokker-Planck equation. Stochastic oscillator. Fluctuations; spectral density of fluctuations, Nyquist noise, fluctuation-dissipation theorem.

Organisation

Department of Microtechnology and Nanoscience

Literature

L. E. Reichl, "A Modern Course in Statistical Physics" (Wiley, NY, 1998).
Jari Kinaret, "Statistical Physics" (Lecture notes, 1996).
Recommended additional material:
L.D. Landau and E.M. Lifshits, "Statistical Physics, I", Course of Theoretical Physics v. 5 (Oxford, Pergamon, 1980).
E.M. Lifshits and L.P. Pitayevsky, "Physical Kinetics", Course of Theoretical Physics v. 10 (Oxford, Pergamon, 1981).

Examination

Homework assignments.
Written exam.

Page manager Published: Mon 28 Nov 2016.