# Tag Info

64

When you say "why aren't things being destroyed", you presumably mean "why aren't the chemical bonds that hold objects together being broken". Now, we can determine the energy it takes to break a bond - that's called the "bond energy". Let's take, for example, a carbon-carbon bond, since it's a common one in our bodies. The bond energy of a carbon-carbon ...

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The question isn't silly. The speed of each molecule in the liquid is much higher than the speed of either the piston or the water shooting out from the nozzle. At room temperature, for water molecules the average is on the order of 500m/s. And yet, the speed of sound in water is three times higher than that, which implies that pressure can propagate in ...

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The partition function is strongly related to a very useful tool in probability theory called the moment generating function(al) of the probability distribution. For any probability distribution $p$ of some random variable $X$, the generating function $\mathcal{M}(z)$ is defined as being: \mathcal{M}(z) \equiv \langle e^{zX}\rangle ...

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Adjacent molecules in a liquid all repel each other because of the electron clouds that surround the nuclei that they contain. In that sense these molecules never even 'touch' each other (at least not in the intuitive sense of the word). When you apply pressure to the liquid you're squeezing them into a (very slightly) smaller volume, thereby increasing the ...

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$\hbar$ does not need to appear in classical statistical mechanics. You are free to replace it with any quantity with units of angular momentum, say $\hbar_{\mathrm{C}}$. As long as this is choosen smaller than the size you can experimentally probe (i.e., as long as you don't ask questions of the theory that contain structure on this length scale or below) ...

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$h$ factor The factor of $1/h^{3N}$ is a total hack. The integral over phase space has dimensions, whereas $Z$ only makes sense if it's dimensionless. The $h$ factors are there to make $Z$ dimensionless. Suppose you have a system with only one particle in one dimension. Then the integral in phase space goes over one position variable, $dq$ and one momentum ...

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The partition function contains so much information because it is directly related to the free energy, $$F = - k_B T \ln(Z) \, .$$ The physical assumption behind considering $F$ as a thermodynamic potential is that the statistics of the system as described by the canonical ensemble. In turn, the applicability of the canonical ensemble is a direct ...

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I can see different subtleties in Landau's argument. First of all, it isn't entirely clear what is meant by "there are only seven additive constants of motion". To give an example, consider a single particle hamiltonian: $$H=\frac{\mathbf p^2}{2m}+m\omega ^2\frac{\mathbf q ^2}{2}.$$ For this hamiltonian there are several conserved quantities: $$e(\mathbf ... 6 In some sense yes. The temperature is defined as an imaginary time in Matsubara Green's functions or some path integrals. Thus, a negative inverse imaginary temperature can be considered as a time. Here is a quotation from Alexander Altland, Ben Simons "Condensed Matter Field Theory": "Thus, real time dynamics and quantum statistical mechanics can be ... 6 It depends on the parameter you consider. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution (as the name is applied in the Wikipedia article you link) is the distribution of the particle's speed (absolute value of the velocity) in a gas and this is a chi distribution. You probably were thinking of the distribution in terms of the vectorial velocity and then indeed it ... 6 Let's simplify things down to the barest minimum: one dimension, one particle, and a wall. O | The particle moves to the right, hits the wall, and rebounds, perfectly elastically. If the wall is fixed in place, the particle will leave the collision with exactly the same kinetic energy as it came in with. But what if the wall is moving to ... 6 OP's question (v1) is essentially asking Does the operator identity$$ e^{\frac{it}{\hbar}[\hat{H},~\cdot~]}\hat{A}~ =~ e^{i\hat{H}t/\hbar}\hat{A}e^{-i\hat{H}t/\hbar} \tag{1} $$have an analog using functions/symbols H and A rather than operators \hat{H} and \hat{A}, respectively? The answer is: Yes, in terms of the Groenewold-Moyal star ... 6 This phenomenon has been studied by Vella and Mahadevan and written up in the American Journal of Physics (http://scitation.aip.org/content/aapt/journal/ajp/73/9/10.1119/1.1898523). It's called the Cheerios effect. If the cereal pieces clump together away from the edges of the bowl, they gravitate toward a slight concavity in the surface caused by milk ... 5 Yes, neutrinos should obey Fermi-Dirac statistics and yes, the Pauli Exclusion Principle should operate for neutrinos. But let's examine how dense the neutrino population has to be for this to be important. The Fermi momentum is given by$$ p_F = \left( \frac{3}{8\pi}\right) h n_{\nu}^{1/3} $$where n_{\nu} is the neutrino number density. In order to be ... 5 Non-equilibrium systems are most often considered in the approximation where local equilibrium is valid, yielding a hydrodynamic or elasticity description. Local equilibrium means that equilibrium is assumed to hold on a scale large compared to the microscopic scale but small compared with the scale where observations are made. In this case, one considers a ... 5 First let me repeat what Yvan Velenik says in the comment: The terminology is somewhat unfortunate, because you don't need that much statistics, rather you'll need some probability theory. To elaborate, quoting Wikipedia, Statistics is the study of the collection, analysis, interpretation, presentation, and organization of data. [...] Statistics deals ... 5 Giving the value simply of k_B T is generally more useful, because I can plug that into anything. Sure, I might need to know the ideal gas energy, and multiply by 3/2. But maybe I need to put it into a partition function, and I just need k_B T. Maybe I'm worried about a harmonic oscillator and I just have the two degrees of freedom. The 3/2 is ... 5 There are of course many books out there, quantum statistics is a really well-established field, so regardless of suggestions here you should really look further on your own as well and find one that suits you best. But here are a few that I've used in the past that you may find useful: Statistical mechanics: A survival guide by Mike Glazer and Justin ... 5 The answer lies in probability theory. Roughly, the probability of an event or macro state A to happen is the number of instances \Omega(A) in which it is fulfilled divided by the total number of possible instances or micro states \Omega i.e. p(A) = \frac{\Omega(A)}{\Omega}. So the reason why you want to maximize \Omega(A) is because you seek ... 4 The ratio between avaible microstates is given by the following ratio:$$ \frac{n_{B}}{n_{A}}=\frac{\int_{V/2}d^{3N}q d^{3N}p}{\int_{V}d^{3N}q d^{3N}p}=\frac{\int_{V/2}d^{3N}q}{\int_{V}d^{3N}q}=\frac{\int_{V/2}d^{3}q_1 \int_{V/2}d^3 q_{2}\dots }{\int_{V}d^{3}q_1 \int_{V}d^3 q_{2}\dots}=\left( V/2 \right)^N/V^N=\frac{1}{2^N}$$where N is the number of ... 4 Characteristically, a critical point occurs somewhere anytime you have a continuous phase transistion. That is, if you have two phases of a substance that themselves share their intrinsic symmetries. The classic example is the critical point associated with the liquid gas transition, as you note. Liquids are isotropic and homogenous, gases are isotropic ... 4 In statistical mechanics, at least when you can ignore the spin of the particles you're dealing with, the occupation number of a quantum state (that is, the number of particles in the state, or probability of a particle being found in the state) is proportional to e^{-E/kT}, where E is the energy of the state. If you have a harmonic oscillator at ... 4 It's true. Special equipment and a long time is required to mix helium and nitrogen. According to one study, a mixture of 2.7% He, 93.3% N at 800 p.s.i.g. required a special cradle to repeatedly upend the cylinder, and 20.5 hours to reach equilibrated gas, which then remained mixed: http://pubs.acs.org/doi/abs/10.1021/je60005a002. The helium repeatedly ... 4 The mean free path can be meaningful quantity in quantum mechanics, although usually only in a semi-classical regime. It is particularly useful in the kinetic theory of quantum liquids at low temperature, where the excitations of the system can be described as quasiparticles that propagate approximately ballistically and interact only rarely. You can define ... 4 The ground state of the toric code can be understand as a superposition of all loop configurations in the z basis. The fact that these loops fluctuate at all length scales (and thus around the torus) leads to the topological order in the system. The \sigma_z terms lead to a "tension" in the loops, penalizing long loops. Eventually, this tension will ... 4 For the Laplacian$$ \Delta ~:=~ -\frac{d^2}{dx^2} ~\geq~ 0, $$the corresponding HS transformation reads$$\exp\left(-\frac{a}{2}\Delta\right) f(x)~=~\int_{\mathbb{R}} \!\frac{dy}{\sqrt{2\pi a}}\exp\left(-\frac{y^2}{2a}\right) f(x+y), \qquad a~>~0. Proof: Use Fourier transformation.

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There are quite a few conceptual confusions in this question. A system is either closed or open. A system is not "equilibrium" or "non-equilibrium". Also, a system is either conservative or dissipative. The ergodic theorem does not apply to open systems, neither to dissipative systems, since they tend to tend to a fixed point or something like that. A ...

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To find the global minima of a function in a configuration space using Monte Carlo methods there are two main approaches simulated annealing and parallel tempering. Simulated annealing Simulated annealing is single Markov chain starting at high temperature for global exploration. The system is then evolved via Monte Carlo update whose criteria for ...

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The von Neumann entropy, written in terms of the quantum mechanical density operator, is a constant of the motion if you keep track of everything (including entanglement with the environment) and don't have any collapse events (which, depending on your favorite interpretation of quantum mechanics, might not exist anyway). The thing is that this fact already ...

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Let us define: $$\hat L=i\sum ^N_{j=1}\bigg(\frac{{p}_j}{m_j}\frac{\partial }{\partial q^j}+\vec {F}_j(\boldsymbol q )\frac{\partial }{\partial p_j}\bigg)$$The Liouville operator can be expanded in terms of components and a basis like any vector field. Let $\xi =(q^1,\dots ,q^n,p^1,\dots p^n)$ be a phase space vector. ...

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