A Concise Introduction to Thermodynamics for Physicists

This introductory textbook provides a synthetic overview of the laws and formal aspects of thermodynamics and was designed for undergraduate students in physics, and in the physical sciences. Language and notation have been kept as simple as possible throughout the text.

While this is a self-contained text on thermodynamics (i.e. focused on macroscopic physics), emphasis is placed on the microscopic underlying model to facilitate the understanding of key concepts such as entropy, and motivate a future course on statistical physics.

This book will equip the reader with an understanding of the scope of this discipline and of its applications to a variety of physical systems

Throughout the text readers are continuously challenged with conceptual questions that prompt reflection and facilitate the understanding of subtle issues. Each chapter ends by presenting worked problems to support and motivate self-study, in addition to a series of proposed exercises whose solutions are available as supplementary material.

Features

• Pedagogically designed, including illustrations, keyword definitions, highlights, summaries of key ideas and concepts, and boxes with additional topics that complement the materials presented in the main text.
• Presents active reading strategies, such as conceptual problems, discussion questions, worked examples with comments, end of chapter problems, and further reading to stimulate engagement with the text.
• Guides the reader with ease through a difficult subject by providing extra help whenever needed to overcome the more demanding technical and conceptual aspects.

Solutions Manual available upon qualifying course adoption.

Patrícia Faísca is Assistant Professor (with habilitation) in the Department of Physics, Faculty of Sciences, at the University of Lisbon, and principal investigator at the Biosystems and Integrative Sciences Institute. She received a PhD in Physics in 2002 from the University of Warwick as part of the Gulbenkian PhD Program in Biology and Medicine. She has a broad interdisciplinary education covering Physics, Biology and Mathematics. Her fields of interest include biological physics, thermodynamics, and statistical physics.