Solution

ID: past-exam-of-the-general-relativity-and-cosmology-course-of-the-university-of-oxford/2018/4/c/solution

For zero chemical potential, each species contributes . Thus
Entropy density scales as at fixed relativistic particle content; total entropy also includes the changing proper volume. An isolated adiabatically expanding comoving gas has conserved total entropy and constant, rather than its total entropy falling as .
At equal temperature, single electrons and photons each have two spin/polarization states. In the ultrarelativistic approximation,
Positrons are a separate species with the same contribution, so . This distinction is needed for the heating count in part d. At the exact supplied temperature the electron rest mass gives corrections to the ideal ratio; it is the limiting relativistic value requested by the problem.
There is also a sign convention issue in the introductory entropy formula. With the chemical-potential convention used in the supplied distribution, the Euler relation is , so . Its chemical-potential term has the opposite sign to the printed one. For a concrete counterexample, a dilute monatomic ideal gas with one internal state and , where is the thermal de Broglie wavelength, has , and . Its entropy is ; the printed plus sign would instead give . All chemical potentials have been neglected here, so this source error does not change any of the above results.

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