Microcanonical ensemble
Lecture IV; This lecture, the 4th in the series of statistical mechanics lectures, a paper for the physics honors degree class, was delivered on the 10th of January this year (2018).
You can find the previous lectures here ( Lecture — I, II ) and here ( Lecture — III ).
Topics covered in this lecture
a. Recapitulation of some previous ideas and — important remarks
b. Microcanonical ensemble — definition and properties
c. Some basic parameters and formalism
Recapitulation and remarks
In our previous lecture we defined the phase space density or distribution function rho (q, p; t) for a classical statistical system with an aim to connect it to a thermodynamic system.
We saw that an ensemble system would be stationary if rho does not have any explicit time dependence, …
Remarks
The type of general ensemble we defined as mental copies of actual system occupying each possible microstate can be called a Gibbsian Ensemble.
The above condition of statistical density as a stationary or time-independent variable would represent conditions of equilibrium.
We defined ensemble average of a physically measurable quantity