Modeling thermodynamic distance, curvature and fluctuations. A geometric approach (Q341075)

The book is divided into two parts and nine chapters. In the first part which contains an introduction and the three main chapters, the author recalls the mathematical tools which will be used in the second part. Chapter 2 gathers the main definitions and properties of algebraic structures (sets, equivalence and ordering relations, groups, fields and spaces) and the equivalence classes for reference frame transformations. Chapter 3 gathers the bases of vector calculus and of differential calculus. Chapter 4 presents the elements of Riemann geometry starting from the definition of Riemann spaces, of curvilinear coordinates and the differential calculus in such curvilinear coordinates and ending with manifolds, covariant differentiation, curvature and Jacobi's equation in this context. Part II presents the applications of the mathematical tools presented in Part I to geometric methods in thermodynamics. Chapter 5 is devoted to the description of equilibrium thermodynamics, starting from the ideas developed by Massieu, using the two extensive quantities: the internal energy \(U\) and the entropy \(S\). The author recalls the expressions of the Helmholtz free energy \(F=U-TS\), where \(T\) is the temperature, and of the Gibbs free energy \(G=U-TS-PV\), where \(P\) is the pressure and \(V\) the volume of the thermodynamical system. He writes the first law of thermodynamics as \(\delta Q-\delta W=dU\), where \(\delta Q\) and \(\delta W\) represent small amounts of heat and mechanical work and \(dU\) is the infinitesimal variation of the internal energy. The author then provides computations which give the expressions of different physical quantities. Considering an open system which contains particles of different species which can enter or exit the system, he writes the internal energy as a function of \(S\) and of the numbers \(N_{a}\) of particles of the different species. He defines the chemical potential of each species as the partial derivative \(\mu _{a}=\frac{\partial U}{\partial N_{a}}\) for fixed \(S\) and \( N_{b}\), \(b\neq a\). He writes the Euler relationship \(U-TS-PV-\sum_{a}\mu _{a}N_{a}=0\) and defines the Gibbs-Duhem relationship \(-SdT+VdP- \sum_{a}N_{a}d\mu _{a}=0\). He then describes the thermodynamic stability, starting from the notion of mechanical equilibrium, and he discusses the principles of maximum entropy and of minimal internal energy. The chapter ends with the description of thermodynamic equilibrium and an application to systems in contact and of work potentials. Chapter 6 starts with the description of contact manifolds and of Legendre submanifolds. The author says that every thermodynamic system in equilibrium can be represented in a thermodynamic phase space \((M,\theta )\) as the Legendre submanifolds of the equation \(\theta =0\). He recalls the notions of contact transformation, of contact vector fields, of brackets structures in thermodynamics, and the chapter ends with examples of contact flows in thermodynamics. The short Chapter 7 is devoted to the description of the thermodynamic distance between two thermodynamic states, using statistical tools. The author starts with the classical notion of statistical distance. Then the links between Gibbs statistics and thermodynamics are analyzed. Using tools from Riemannian geometry, the author analyzes the entropy production, the notion of dissipation for near equilibrium processes, and he gives discrete forms of so-called horse-carrot theorems associated to the dissipation in a system. In Chapter 8, the author presents the geometrization of thermodynamic fluctuations, starting from the expression of the entropy in terms of the number of microstates: \(S=k_{B}\ln \Omega \), following Boltzmann. Writing the fluctuations of a thermodynamic quantity, the author discusses the difficulties and advantages of the Gaussian approximation. Then he computes the classical fluctuations of two independent quantities and the Gaussian approximation in the general case. He formalizes the notion of covariant and consistent theory of fluctuations, and the chapter ends with examples concerning a paramagnetic system and the 1D Ising model. The final Chapter 9 describes the notions of thermodynamic curvature, of correlation, and of stability. The author first analyzes the situation of equivalent metrics through the introduction of Christoffel symbols. He describes the properties of the Riemann curvature tensor and of the normal Riemann coordinates. Then he recalls the Weinhold geometry and he presents the thermodynamic curvature which will be illustrated in different examples. Throughout the book, the author gathers the essential mathematical tools he uses for the presentation of the geometrization of thermodynamics. Readers who are not well acquainted with such mathematical tools will thus get in an efficient way the bases for a complete understanding of the applications of these Riemann geometric tools to thermodynamics.