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PHYS-106(b): General physics : thermodynamics

Le but du cours de Physique générale est de donner à l'étudiant les notions de base nécessaires à la compréhension des phénomènes physiques. L'objectif est atteint lorsque l'étudiant est capable de prévoir quantitativement les conséquences de ces phénomène ...

Instructors (2)

Sylvain Bréchet

Sylvain Bréchet was born on October 13th, 1981 in Moudon (legal origin Epesses, VD, Switzerland). He obtained a Master of Science in physics at EPFL in 2005. He went on to Cambridge for his PhD studies in theoretical cosmology from 2005 to 2009 under the supervision of Prof. Lasenby (FRS) and Prof. Michael Hobson at the Cavendish Laboratory of the University of Cambridge. He went back to EPFL where he is since 2010 university lecturer and research scientist in the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics. He taught classical mechanics, special relativity and thermodynamics to mechanical, electrical engineering students and physics students. He is currently writing a textbook in thermodynamics.

Nicolas Grandjean

Nicolas Grandjean received a PhD degree in physics from the University ofNice Sophia Antipolis in 1994 and shortly thereafter joined the French National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) as a permanent staff member. In 2004, he was appointed tenure-track assistant professor at the École polytechnique fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) where he created the Laboratory for advanced semiconductors for photonics and electronics. He was promoted to full professor in 2009. He was the director of the Institute of Condensed Matter Physics from 2012 to 2016 and then moved to the University of California at Santa Barbara where he spent 6 months as a visiting professor. Since 2018, he is the head of the School of Physics at the EPFL. He was awarded the Sandoz Family Foundation Grant for Academic Promotion, received the “Nakamura Lecturer” Award in 2010, the "Quantum Devices Award” at the 2017 Compound Semiconductor Week, and “2016 best teacher” award from the EPFL Physics School. His research interests are focused on the physics of nanostructures and III-V nitride semiconductor quantum photonics.

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Continuum mechanics is a branch of mechanics that deals with the deformation of and transmission of forces through materials modeled as a continuous mass rather than as discrete particles. The French mathematician Augustin-Louis Cauchy was the first to formulate such models in the 19th century. A continuum model assumes that the substance of the object completely fills the space it occupies. This ignores the fact that matter is made of atoms, however provides a sufficiently accurate description of matter on length scales much greater than that of inter-atomic distances.

Charge density

In electromagnetism, charge density is the amount of electric charge per unit length, surface area, or volume. Volume charge density (symbolized by the Greek letter ρ) is the quantity of charge per unit volume, measured in the SI system in coulombs per cubic meter (C⋅m−3), at any point in a volume. Surface charge density (σ) is the quantity of charge per unit area, measured in coulombs per square meter (C⋅m−2), at any point on a surface charge distribution on a two dimensional surface.

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In vector calculus, divergence is a vector operator that operates on a vector field, producing a scalar field giving the quantity of the vector field's source at each point. More technically, the divergence represents the volume density of the outward flux of a vector field from an infinitesimal volume around a given point. As an example, consider air as it is heated or cooled. The velocity of the air at each point defines a vector field. While air is heated in a region, it expands in all directions, and thus the velocity field points outward from that region.

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In electromagnetism, current density is the amount of charge per unit time that flows through a unit area of a chosen cross section. The current density vector is defined as a vector whose magnitude is the electric current per cross-sectional area at a given point in space, its direction being that of the motion of the positive charges at this point. In SI base units, the electric current density is measured in amperes per square metre. Assume that A (SI unit: m2) is a small surface centred at a given point M and orthogonal to the motion of the charges at M.

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