Principles of Thermodynamics – 1st Edition

About the Author

Jean-PhilippeAnsermet is a professor of physics at École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne
(EPFL), a fellow of the American Physical Society and a past president of the Swiss
Physical Society. He coordinated the teaching of physics at EPFL for 12 years. His course
on mechanics, taught for 25 years, was based on his textbook and a massive open online
course (MOOC) that has generated over half a million views. For more than 15 years, he
has taught thermodynamics to engineering and physics students. An expert in spintronics,
he applies thermodynamics to analyse his pioneering experiments on giant magnetoresistance, or heat–driven spin torques and predict novel effects.

Sylvain D. Brechet completed his PhD studies in theoretical cosmology at the Cavendish
Laboratory of the University of Cambridge as an Isaac Newton fellow. He is lecturer
at the Institute of Physics at EPFL. He teaches mechanics, thermodynamics and electromagnetism to first-year students. His current research focuses on theoretical modelling in
condensed matter physics and more particularly in spintronics. Merging the fields of nonequilibrium thermodynamics, continuum mechanics and electromagnetism, he brought
new insight to spintronics and fluid mechanics. In particular, he predicted in 2013 the
existence of a fundamental irreversible thermodynamic effect now called the Magnetic
Seebeck effect.