Hello. This is 심심한 대학원생 returning with the thermal and statistical physics series. This series will be based on my favorite undergraduate statistical mechanics textbook: "Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics" by Reif. The series will end in chapter 10.
In chapter 1, we will learn about the random walk as a review of statistics, and prove the central limit theorem as additional material. The central limit theorem is a crucial part of statistics, you would have never seen its proof. Of course, it is not rigorous. (You need real analysis in mathematics since you have to define probabilities.)
1D Random walk
Probability distribution
Think about a drunken man who moves either right or left with a distance of 1 for every 1 second. The probability of moving right and left is
At first sight, it seems irrelevant to real physics problems. However, this is one of the fundamental problems in physics. For example, think about an atom with a magnetic moment. The magnetic moment can point only up or down with respect to a certain axis (and quantum mechanically, this is the reality). Then, we can think of a problem: what is the total magnetic moment if there are
Now, let's solve the problem. For
Solving these two relations gives,
Now, let's compute the probability. The probability of going right once is
This probability distribution is called the binomial distribution
Average and standard deviation
Using the above distribution, one can directly obtain the probability of moving rightward
Now, assume that there are several drunken men. If these people move for
For the computation, let
A good measure of the width of the distribution is the ratio between standard deviation and average.
From this, we can deduce that the distribution becomes sharper with increasing
In this class, we learned about the random walk. Next time, we will learn about the more generalized random walk.
References and further readings
F. Reif, "Fundamentals of Statistical and Thermal Physics", Chapter 1.1~1.4
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Random_walk
Written by 심심한 대학원생
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