The book is rather concise, which maintains the focus on the main line. Results are derived rather than asserted. Although this sometimes leads to lengthy mathematical manipulation that can sometimes be difficult to motivate prior to the sought result, it does have the great virtue of providing mathematical certainty.
Previous expositions of non-equilibrium statistical mechanics have tended toward assertion rather than derivation, with results instead being based on plausibility, or argument by analogy, or appeal to authority, or proof by majority opinion. Mathematical derivation gives certainty. Like climbing a mountain with rope, it might be slow, mechanical and unexciting, but it does guarantee that you will achieve the summit in the end.
For these reasons this book is not addressed to students but to more experienced researchers. The material is likely to appeal to researchers starting out on a career, or to those looking for a new research direction that is just opening up and that is likely to present promising opportunities for the foreseeable future.
Non-equilibrium systems in general fit these criteria. Suppose there is some other quantity which is conserved -- say particle number. Everything else is just an application. I'll hand out a few exercises where you get to try this out. Lets take an example. Suppose we have a piece of silicon with an impurity in it.
This might be a chip inside your cell phone. Suppose the impurity has a potential which can trap an electron. We want to know how likely it is to have an electron bound there. There are two states of our impurity, occupied, and unoccupied. Suppose we instead had an attractive potential on the wall of a container of liquid helium. Statistical Mechanics.
Respiratory Mechanics. Fifty Nine. Citation Type. Has PDF. Publication Type. More Filters. Thermalization of isolated quantum many-body system and entanglement. Thermalization of an isolated quantum system has been a non-trivial problem since the early days of quantum mechanics.
In generic isolated systems, non-equilibrium dynamics is expected to result in … Expand. Highly Influenced. View 9 excerpts, cites background. Relaxation of Multitime Statistics in Quantum Systems. Thermodynamics is a theory of equilibrium transformations, but quantum dynamics are inherently out-of-equilibrium.
It remains an open problem to show how the two theories are consistent with each … Expand. Statistical description of small quantum systems beyond the weak-coupling limit.
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