Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-chemistry-a-course-of-the-university-of-cambridge/2022/paper-2/a6/d/solution

For the adsorbed lattice gas, the Helmholtz free energy is
Use Stirling's approximation with large, then differentiate at fixed . Writing surface coverage as gives the adsorption chemical potential
The occupation ratio comes from site-mixing entropy; it is essential near saturation.
Let be the number of free atoms and . In the field-free gas, both spin states have zero energy, so the one-atom partition function is , where is the thermal de Broglie wavelength. For a dilute ideal gas,
Therefore
The last equality uses . The bulk spin degeneracy is two even though the bulk magnetic field vanishes: degeneracy is not the absence of spin states.

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