59 days ago · Science · hide · Fediverse post

I just finished preparing my undergraduate lecture on ideal Fermi gases at zero temperature. Here are my slides. (Note. The derivations are not included, as I sketch them by hand on a document viewer.) (Aside. Personally, I would prefer to do derivations on the whiteboard, but this is viewed unfavourably as the video recording of the lecture will not capture that.)A few things I find amazing about the lecture content.Degeneracy pressure is a macroscopic quantum effect, since it vanishes in the limit Planck's constant goes to zero.Degeneracy pressure is relevant to astrophysics. I enjoyed learning more about how it prevents the collapse of white dwarfs and neutron stars. For the first time (to my memory) I derived the Chandrasekhar limit for white dwarfs. I also enjoyed seeing how this limit is essentially the same physics as the Tolman-Oppenheimer-Volkoff limit for neutron stars.An earlier post discussed some things I find amazing about Chandrasekhar's expression for the upper.A few…

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