Only states within an energy window of order around the Fermi energy can change occupation in a degenerate metal. A Sommerfeld expansion gives electronic energy above its zero-temperature value proportional to , hence . Three-dimensional linear-dispersion acoustic phonons have density of states proportional to ; integrating their Bose occupations gives thermal energy proportional to and the Debye heat capacity . Thus at sufficiently low temperature in the normal state.
Reading the straight low-temperature fit gives approximately and . These estimates agree with the reported fit to this material in the original experiment.[ref] Treating the graph values as approximate, the molar density of states is
The stipulated two electrons per formula unit give . For a single spin-degenerate parabolic band, the molar density of states is . Hence
These are model-dependent effective parameters inferred from the measured heat capacity and assumed carrier count, rather than an independent determination of a unique band structure.
Using the Debye prefactor stated in the question gives
This prefactor counts three effective modes per formula unit. Consistently choosing the same count for the Debye wavevector gives . The corresponding average sound speed is
There is a normalization choice here: a formula unit has 31 atoms. With the conventional full atomic-mode count, the molar Debye coefficient contains an additional factor 31, and both and increase by . That convention gives and , while leaving the inferred sound speed unchanged. The mode count in the Debye model must be used consistently; mixing the printed temperature with an atomic-count wavevector gives an erroneous sound speed.
The upward curvature above about indicates low-energy vibrations missing from a pure acoustic model. In this cage compound, the original analysis fits an additional localized mode with , assigned to a rattling mode of a barium guest atom.[ref] At temperatures high compared with all relevant phonon energies, the full lattice approaches the Dulong-Petit law, . The reduced three-mode model alone approaches and omits the other branches. An approximately linear electronic term can still be added while the carriers remain degenerate, but cannot be extrapolated beyond their Fermi temperature.

Pinned article: Introduction to the OurBigBook Project

Welcome to the OurBigBook Project! Our goal is to create the perfect publishing platform for STEM subjects, and get university-level students to write the best free STEM tutorials ever.
Everyone is welcome to create an account and play with the site: ourbigbook.com/go/register. We belive that students themselves can write amazing tutorials, but teachers are welcome too. You can write about anything you want, it doesn't have to be STEM or even educational. Silly test content is very welcome and you won't be penalized in any way. Just keep it legal!
We have two killer features:
  1. topics: topics group articles by different users with the same title, e.g. here is the topic for the "Fundamental Theorem of Calculus" ourbigbook.com/go/topic/fundamental-theorem-of-calculus
    Articles of different users are sorted by upvote within each article page. This feature is a bit like:
    • a Wikipedia where each user can have their own version of each article
    • a Q&A website like Stack Overflow, where multiple people can give their views on a given topic, and the best ones are sorted by upvote. Except you don't need to wait for someone to ask first, and any topic goes, no matter how narrow or broad
    This feature makes it possible for readers to find better explanations of any topic created by other writers. And it allows writers to create an explanation in a place that readers might actually find it.
    Figure 1.
    Screenshot of the "Derivative" topic page
    . View it live at: ourbigbook.com/go/topic/derivative
  2. local editing: you can store all your personal knowledge base content locally in a plaintext markup format that can be edited locally and published either:
    This way you can be sure that even if OurBigBook.com were to go down one day (which we have no plans to do as it is quite cheap to host!), your content will still be perfectly readable as a static site.
    Figure 5. . You can also edit articles on the Web editor without installing anything locally.
    Video 3.
    Edit locally and publish demo
    . Source. This shows editing OurBigBook Markup and publishing it using the Visual Studio Code extension.
  3. https://raw.githubusercontent.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook-media/master/feature/x/hilbert-space-arrow.png
  4. Infinitely deep tables of contents:
    Figure 6.
    Dynamic article tree with infinitely deep table of contents
    .
    Descendant pages can also show up as toplevel e.g.: ourbigbook.com/cirosantilli/chordate-subclade
All our software is open source and hosted at: github.com/ourbigbook/ourbigbook
Further documentation can be found at: docs.ourbigbook.com
Feel free to reach our to us for any help or suggestions: docs.ourbigbook.com/#contact