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After a brief exposition of the history of the Fermi-Dirac statistics, we show how this statistics emerges as a possible statistics for a quantum description of an assembly of identical and indistinguishable particles. We then present the necessary tools for computing thermodynamic properties of specific fermionic systems and highlight the role it has played in our understanding of physical phenomena...
R Srinivasan is an eminent physicist who has worked at IIT (Chennai), DAE Facility at Indore and at RRI (Bangalore). In recent years, he is fully engaged in improving the standard of teaching experimental physics in the country. For this purpose he has developed some relatively newer techniques of measurement made possible by the availability of inexpensive analogue chips. Since the year 2000 he has...
This article introduces Fermi Transport, starting with elementary examples and slowly rising in level. A number exercises are suggested for the reader’s active participation.
A brief account of the life of Enrico Fermi, against the background of others of his generation, is given. His role in the revival of Italian Physics, and influence on many others, are described. Fermi’s major contributions to quantum physpersonality, are recounted.
Fermi’s name is associated with a style — later much imitated — of making quick, approximate but surprisingly accurate estimates of answers to interesting questions, ranging from “How many piano tuners are there in Chicago?” to “What is the energy of a nuclear explosion?”. This article lists a few examples and goes into explosions in more detail, to bring out some aspects of order of magnitude estimation...
The history of weak interactions starting with Fermi’s creation of the beta decay theory and culminating in its modern avatar in the form of the electroweak gauge theory is described. Discoveries of parity violation, matter-antimatter asymmetry, W and Z bosons and neutrino mass are highlighted.
Seaweeds are taxonomically diverse group of marine plants from which the land plants diverged over fifty crore years ago. Traditionally having been classified based on plant color as green, brown and red, modern molecular systematic evidences suggest that these plants are extraordinarily diverse. A number of seaweeds are edible and have been projected as a future food source. Seaweeds are also important...
This section of Resonance presents thought-provoking questions, and discusses answers a few months later. Readers are invited to send new questions, solutions to old ones and comments, to ‘Think It Over’, Resonance, Indian Academy of Sciences, Bangalore 560 080. Items illustrating ideas and concepts will generally be chosen.
The physics behind the game of billiards is rather well understood as is our grasp of classical mechanics. We present here a mathematical explanation of why slice shots are more difficult than direct shots. Despite a large number of treatises dedicated to the study of physics of billiards, it appears that the simple explanation has escaped our attention until now. We show that high impact-parameter...
Most of the molecules react to form products by climbing a barrier. The energy involved in this climbing of the barrier is known as the activation energy of the reaction. Questions like how fast a reaction occurs can be answered by considering the height of the barrier. However, in some reactions, the reactants transform to products by directly tunnelling across the barrier instead of climbing over...
Droplets are of great scientific interest because studying their formation and dynamics is important in many technologies such as in microfluidics [1, 2]. Evaporation of droplets is another interesting aspect that has caught much scientific attention. An example of an evaporating droplet is a coffee droplet spilled on a table. After evaporation the coffee droplet leaves a ring-like stain called a...
Starting from the triangle inequality, we will discuss a series of shape optimization problems using elementary geometry and ultimately derive the classical isoperimetric inequality in the plane.
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