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Joule's law, and thermodynamics in general, is a model of the classical world. Here, classical should be interpreted as non-quantum-mechanical. Thermodynamics is the study of large collections of particles and their collective behavior. No microscopic model is assumed, and one tries to extract as many (non-trivial) features as possible based on purely ...

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That's a very hard question to answer with the appropriate level of detail! Very broadly speaking in an ideal metal all atoms are forming a perfectly regular crystal lattice. Conduction band electrons can move freely around these atoms, which makes it easy to pass a current trough the metal. In a (theoretical) metal with perfect crystal lattice the ...

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The specific heat of a molecule depends on the number of degrees of freedom the molecule has. There are several degrees of freedom available: translation (3), rotation (3), vibration (depends on the number of bonds in a molecule) and electronic modes. Now, for something that is monatomic, you have 3 translational modes (x,y,z directions), zero rotation ...

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You might be best off creating a bunch of trial systems and evolving each one independently using the (much easier) Hamilton's equations, which are good old ordinary differential equations. After all this is how the Liouville equation was constructed in the first place by people like Gibbs---in the limit of an infinite number of trial systems, you get the ...

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It's a sum over states. The partition function can also be written as \begin{align} Z = \sum_\alpha g_\alpha e^{-\epsilon_\alpha/kT} \end{align} where $\alpha$ is an index which labels levels, $\epsilon_\alpha$ is the energy of level $\alpha$, and $g_\alpha$ is the degeneracy of level $\alpha$. This follows from the sum over states by noting that in that ...

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Suppose the spins on the sites of the square lattice are coupled nearest neighbor so that the Hamiltonian is defined as $$H=-J\sum_{<ij>}S_iS_j$$ where $<ij>$ denotes nearest neighbors $i$ and $j$ (each site has 4 nearest neighbors). The ground state of the Hamiltonian will be given by finding a configuration of spins $\{S_i\}$ for which the ...

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