Lecture 11: Bose Gas and Ideal Gas

Review of Fermions and Bosons. Review of Fermi Gas. All about the Bose gas, and its ditsrubution function. In the classical limit, the Fermi-Dirac distribution function and the Bose-Einstein distribution function approach the same form, and we recover ideal gas physics. We derive many properties about the ideal gas, and extend it to the case of internal degrees of freedom. More detail about the equipartition theorem, and how as temperature is raised, the heat capacity jumps up every time a new degree of freedom becomes excited. Example: Diatomic molecule. (Visual aids: many diatomic molecule models made from balls and springs.) Example: Experimental verification of the ideal gas law through the Sackur-Tetrode equation for entropy.

Lecture Audio