Contributions in Non-Equilibrium Statistical Mechanics and Thermodynamics

摘要

Apart from a thermodynamic study of the hydromagnetic stability problem for a system far from equilibrium, the essential matter of this report consists in a number of applications and extensions of the general statistical mechanical theory of irreversible processes previously developed. Generalized kinetic equations are obtained for non-uniform systems as for systems in external fields of arbitrary strength (classical case). The resulting expressions for the transport coefficients are analyzed and shown to be equivalent, at all orders in a perturbation expansion, to the forms obtained from the auto-correlation function formulae. The latter are further discussed for the quantum case. The study of an unstable plasma has exhibited the stabilization mechanism associated to the correlations; and the equation for an inhomogeneous plasma far from equilibrium has been derived. A rigorous statistical mechanical formulation is given for the hydrodynamics of a relativistic plasma. (Author)