Physical Chemistry CHEM 4333 @UMR

Structure of the course

3 credits
Meets twice a week 75min/session
Three midterm exams and one cumulative final exam that can substitute your previous grades

What is this course about? Why would I take it?

Physical chemistry is a vast discipline. It is recommended to any student who is planning to apply to any graduate school program that involves a physical science (from biophysics and molecular biology to chemistry).

The content

This is a "Molecular physical chemistry" course, that is, an introduction to some tools that allow us to understand macroscopic magnitudes from the atomic perspective. You may have learned in your previous chemistry courses about Gibbs free energy, entropy or heat capacity. In this course we will connect all these concepts with atomic properties derived from quantum mechanics. You will also learn how to simulate on a computer simple molecular systems and calculate thermodynamic properties from them.

One semester PCHEM

This is a one semester of a physical chemistry course that is typically taught in two semesters. Since at UMR we will only offer one semester, we are taking some topics from the two different semesters. Namely, we include thermodynamics, statistical thermodynamics and an introduction to spectroscopy and we leave out kinetics, quantum mechanics and a more thorough coverage of spectroscopy.
This course is close to CHEM4501 being taught at UMTC (see here http://pollux.chem.umn.edu/4501/)

Pre-requisites

Two semesters of General Chemistry
Two semesters of College Physics
Some exceptions can be made. The physical topics that we need are:
- Mechanics: momentum, forces, work, energy, potential
- Electrostatics: Coulomb force and fields
Two semesters of College Calculus
Some exceptions can be made as long as you have seen the following topics
- Partial derivatives
- Differential equations

Talk to the instructor if you have any questions about it. While pre-requisites are strongly encouraged, the course will give some review material, and allocate time, to acquire the necessary physics and mathematics.

Outline of topics

The referenced chapters belong to the recommended textbook: "Physical Chemistry. A molecular approach" by D.A. McQuarrie and J.D. Simon

Midterm 1: Quantum and statistical mechanics
1. Introduction to quantum mechanics: Molecular energy levels
2. Boltzmann factor and partition functions (Ch. 17)
  1. Macroscopic vs microscopic
  2. Ensemble properties
  3. Heat capacity as the T-derivative of average energy
  4. Partition functions for vibration, rotation, electronic and translation
3. The partition function of an ideal gas (Ch. 18)
Midterm 2: Thermodynamics
1. First Law of thermodynamics (Ch. 19)
2. Second Law of thermodynamics (Ch. 20, 21)
3. Helmholtz and Gibbs free energy (Ch. 22)
Midterm 3: Introduction to spectroscopy
1. Phase equilibria and Liquid-liquid solutions (Ch. 23, 24)
2. Chemical equilibrium (Ch. 26)
3. Molecular Spectroscopy (Ch. 13)
4. Nuclear magnetic resonance (Ch. 14)