DIFFUSION, TRANSPORT AND NON-EQUILIBRIUM STATISTICAL MECHANICS

COURSE DESCRIPTION: Graduate level introduction to recent work on the statistical mechanics of irriversible processes. Insights developed in the dynamical systems theory are influencing our understanding of the fundations of statistical mechanics and transport theory in particular. The emphasis is on deriving macroscopic transport properties of large systems from the underlying microscopic dynamics.

• Linear response, correlations.
• Hydrodynamics, Brownian motion.
• Langevin, Fokker-Planck equations.
• Boltzmann equation.
• Liouville equation.
• Poincare recurrence theorem.
• Green-Kubo time correlation method.
• Transport, Onsager reciprocity.
• Transport coefficients and chaos.
• Deterministic diffusion.
• Far-from-equilibrium steady states.

The course is aimed at PhD students and postdoctoral fellows in physics, chemistry, applied and pure mathematics.

TEXT: Course will be partially based on J. Robert Dorfman's From Molecular Chaos to Dynamical Chaos, the Classical and Quantum Chaos: A Cyclist Treatise lecture notes, available on ChaosBook.org, and the forthcoming Chaos, Scattering and Statistical Mechanics, (Cambridge Univ. Press, Cambridge 1997) by Pierre Gaspard. Weekly homework sets.

TEACHING METHOD: Two lectures per week

EVALUATION: Homework sets, midterm and a final examination

START: Tuesday, January 6 1998 in Tech 3823, with detailed schedule available on . ChaosBook.org/~predrag/NUcourses/D60-sched.html . Lecture topics will be described weekly by e-mail. Please subscribe to the course e-mail distribution even if you are only interested in a subset of the topics - send e-mail with text (and no header):

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Predrag Cvitanović