Lecture on Thermodynamics

These are lecture slides and handouts for a lecture on the basic principles of thermodynamics for materials science by Tobias Brink, held in 2024 at the Max Planck Institute for Sustainable Materials.

This 4-part lecture series covers first the basic laws and formalisms of thermodynamics. Then the Legendre transformation is covered, which is used to express the thermodynamic formalism in terms of practical variables like temperature and pressure. Finally, an overview over phase diagrams as used in materials science is provided.

Both slides (containing simple animations) and handouts with extensive notes are provided.

As supplemental material, there are also videos of MD simulations that demonstrate the time reversal symmetry of Newtonian systems:

• Time reversal: Revert to start
  Demonstration of time reversal symmetry in Newtonian mechanics using an MD simulation. In the middle of the simulation we let time go backwards (negative timestep) and return to the initial state.
• Velocity reversal: Revert to start
  Demonstration of time reversal symmetry in Newtonian mechanics using an MD simulation. In the middle of the simulation we invert the velocities of all atoms and return to the initial state. This is equivalent to letting time run backwards.
• Time and velocity reversal
  Demonstration of time reversal symmetry in Newtonian mechanics using an MD simulation. In the middle of the simulation we let time go backwards (negative timestep) and invert all velocities of the atoms (yellow atoms). The blue atoms continue as normal. We can see that this double inversion leads to unmodified physics: the blue and yellow atoms move the same way.