STATPHYS

The material presented in this invaluable textbook has been tested in two courses. One of these is a graduate-level survey of statistical physics; the other, a rather personal perspective on critical behavior. Thus, this book defines a progression starting at the book-learning part of graduate education and ending in the midst of topics at the research level. To supplement the research-level side the book includes some research papers. Several of these are classics in the field, including a suite of six works on self-organized criticality and complexity, a pair on diffusion-limited aggregation, some papers on correlations near critical points, a few of the basic sources on the development of the real-space renormalization group, and several papers on magnetic behavior in a plain geometry. In addition, the author has included a few of his own papers.

I give a concise introduction to some essential concepts of statistical mechanics: 1. Probability theory (constrained distributions, concentration theorem, frequency estimation, hypothesis testing); 2. Macroscopic systems in equilibrium (macrostate, thermodynamic variables, entropy, first law, thermodynamic potentials, correlations); 3. Linear response (Kubo formula).