Physique
Preparation for 2024 French Physicists’ Tournament.

The goal of this course is to learn how to use the tools allowing to write scientific documents of high quality. The LATEX typesetting system is universally used in the scientific and technical literature; it is based on the language TEX created by Donald Knuth.

You will write a short article using your own lecture notes from one of the courses you attended. Your document should comply with the standards of the scientific papers: front matter, abstract, introduction, body content, conclusion, and references.

A reasonable, minimal, scientific computing environment might consist in (preferably in a unix-like system!):

  • A LATEX distribution (TeXLive on linux)
  • An editor: TeXMaker, vim, etc.
  • A python programming environment (you may use Anaconda)
This course addresses to students who followed a first statistical physics course at the level of the classical book by Kittel, “Thermal physics” (1980).

Introduction
Gibbs ensembles
Equilibrium and irreversibility
Non interacting systems, bose and fermi gases
Paramagnetism and diamagnetism
Interacting gases: virial expansion
Lattice models
Phase transitions
Twodimensional ising model
Problems, exercises and applications

Bibliography:
Landau, D. and Lifshitz, E., Statistical Physics (Pergamon Oxford, 1980).
Kardar, M., Statistical Physics, vol. 1 Particles, vol. 2 Fields (Cambridge, 2007).
Sethna, J. P., Statistical Mechanics, Entropy, Order Parameter and Complexity (Oxford, 2006).
Schwabl, F., Statistical Mechanics (Springer, 2006).